This year marks the start of a new five year Strategic Plan for BikeMN! We’re excited with where we are headed. Our Strategic Plan Working Group, composed of staff, board, and partner stakeholders has been working hard over the past months to assemble the plan. And, it is coming together nicely! After it’s adoption by the board later in the summer, we’ll be sharing it widely. In the meantime, we’re thrilled to announce brand new versions of our mission and vision statements.
The new mission and vision statements (and the rest of the strategic plan) came from a process that started by looking deeply at feedback from our stakeholders. BikeMN worked through our board chair, Steph Jacobs, and her Humphrey School of Public Affairs class to conduct stakeholder interviews, and BikeMN staff assembled a stakeholder survey for more input. Altogether, the working group reviewed feedback from dozens of stakeholders totaling more than 100 pages of data on how BikeMN is doing and where we should be going. BikeMN’s commitment to anti-racism and equity heavily influenced this process to ensure there was representation from BIPOC stakeholders, across gender identities, and stakeholders for whom BikeMN has not focused engagement efforts but who ride bikes out of necessity. We also used traditional metrics to balance a range of ages and geographies across Minnesota to round out this feedback evaluation.
The Working Group looked deeply at this feedback as it prepared a new direction for BikeMN, which was subsequently reviewed and confirmed with the board and staff. We’re proud to present our new mission and vision today, and give some explanation for how we got there.
Mission –
The Bicycle Alliance of Minnesota engages people, provides education, and advocates for biking and walking.
After a start at being a more “vision-y” statement without clarity of action, the Working Group returned to action oriented language. It reflects:
- Putting people at the center/beginning
- The Focus areas of our strategic plan: engagement, education, and advocacy
- The direction of the organization affirmed by BikeMN’s 2019 Theory of Change to add “walking” to our core work.
It is worth noting that “rolling” was consciously excluded from the mission statement. The term has ambiguity that to insiders has meaning in accessibility and inclusivity. But, to most people “rolling” generally connotes all wheels including skaters and scooters, which BikeMN is not directly working towards. In addition, though there are a number of organizations working towards the accessibility meaning of rolling, there is an absence of organizations prioritizing walking statewide. Everyone agreed that BikeMN desires to be a leader in walking over the next five years, and we will continue advocating and supporting organizations already doing the work for stronger accessibility statewide.
Vision–
We envision a Minnesota where every person everywhere can easily walk, bike, and roll as ways to move in daily life.
BikeMN will have an extended descriptive vision as a part of the strategic plan. The Working Group also felt maintaining a traditional, short statement was important. The statement again prioritizes putting people – and in this case individuals – first. We move to include “rolling” in this vision because it is a future and outcome that will include work that we both do and work we support. It became important to get back to a softer “choice” wording because we want those underserved communities without as many resources to be able to walk, bike, or roll. We removed other adverbs (previous ones were safe and fun) to focus on what was most important and tighten the statement. If walking, biking, and rolling are easy, more people are more likely to be doing them regularly than if they were simply safe and fun. Lastly, the group prioritized that movement every day is important, and again is reflective of BikeMN’s Theory of Change.
We hope you’re as excited as we are about BikeMN’s new direction. We look forward to sharing more of our 2021-26 Strategic Plan with you over the coming months. Have feedback for us on this? Reach out to Info@bikemn.org