Happy 2020 Friends!
As we walk into this new year, I feel incredibly grateful for the work of walkstars like you who are helping Oregon Walks fight to promote walking as a climate justice, health justice, and transportation justice issue. Soon, we’ll be sending out our 2019 annual report, but in the meantime, I want to share a few highlights you helped us accomplish in 2019:
1) Hosted or co-hosted over 50 walks with 19 partners and 1000 walkers,
2) Worked with neighbors in East Portland to identify community walking needs, including developing transportation safety plans for residents who are fighting to get their children safely to school,
3) Served as a proud member of the Getting There Together Coalition (GTT), where we are fighting to make sure pedestrians are centered in Metro’s 2020 Transportation funding package,
4) Kicked off our visibility campaign, #ClearTheCorners to have the city of Portland follow state law that requires a twenty-foot parking set back from intersections,
5) Served on over 10 municipal transportation stakeholder committees,
6) Welcomed 8 new board members with a broad range of perspectives/expertise,
7) Launched a new website!
As we look ahead to building the momentum of our walking movement in 2020, we are especially excited about expanding our walking programming with the development of a walking menu we are sharing with communities most negatively impacted by historic disinvestment in walking conditions, an expansion of our volunteer program, and deepening our commitment to racial equity learning and practice. In other words, we are looking forward to continuing to get better at walking our talk. Quite literally!
Izzy has developed a beautiful newsletter template. We will be sending out a newsletter on the 15th of every month, and in it you can find Program/Policy, Volunteers, Events, Coalitions, Fundraising updates.
Here’s to a great year ahead.
Walk On!
Jess
Glad to see that Footnotes lives on. I was the last editor of the paper version, a real pleasure to create each month.
Jeanne! We were just looking back at Willamette Pedestrian Coalition (WPC) and Oregon Walks’ newsletters. Your Footnotes newsletters are so well done and definitely an inspiration to us. Thank you for editing the original Footnotes — we are honored to follow in your footsteps, so to speak:)