Bike San Diego – Working to be World Class

Reposted from the S&G Endeavors Blog.

Editor’s Note: The title is not deceiving. One of our collaborative strategic planning clients, Bike San Diego (BikeSD), is challenging themselves to work more collaboratively as an organization, and with other partners, to bring a world-class cycling experience to San Diego, California. Armed with a strong public presence through their blog, advocacy wins, outstanding executive director, and skillful board members and stakeholders, they have positioned themselves to be one of the top cities for cycling in the world by 2020. It was so exciting to work with BikeSD and their stakeholders to facilitate a conversation setting the stage for the future of the organization and for cycling in San Diego.

The below blog post, written by Sam Ollinger (executive director of BikeSD), is the first in a series of three posts that tells the BikeSD story.

First, Sam helps us understand what spawned the creation of BikeSD and how they experience significant growth and legitimacy in their first years, urging them to come together as leaders to think about what was next for the organization and its mission. The second post takes an inside look at their strategic retreat facilitated by S & G in March 2015, specifically highlighting feedback from participants and the process used. In the final post, we feature the future of the organization as we take a look at their launched strategic action plan and some of the current activities they are doing during implementation.

We encourage you to check out all of these posts and to think about how such work might help your leadership team, as you think about what’s next for your own organization in 2016 and beyond.

The Story of BikeSD

by Sam Ollinger

A Labor of Love

In early 2009, three strangers met on a bicycle ride and began talking about the lack of a cohesive gathering space to talk about bicycling issues. These strangers (Will Karstens, Thom Bahde and me, Samantha Ollinger) went on to found BikeSD.org – a blog that would serve as a single source of news about bicycling in San Diego. Little did I know that BikeSD the blog would eventually turn into one of San Diego’s largest independent member based advocacy organizations.

Karstens, Bahde, and I wrote on BikeSD.org for nearly two and a half years about all bicycling issues: how bicycling was portrayed in local media, the breathtaking beauty one would witness on an early morning ride, the sorts of bike infrastructure that was (or not) being implemented in the city, and more. Slowly the blog became a credible source of information in the San Diego bicycling community. Many strangers assumed that the individuals behind the website were part of a credible organization and none of us bothered to correct that misperception, but instead we embraced it and rose up to become advocates. We appeared in local media, spoke up against dangerous road conditions and told stories of San Diego’s victims of road violence. It seemed that people were hungry for our blog’s information thus creating “a labor of love” for the three of us.

The Birth of the Organization
After Karstens and Bahde both moved away from San Diego, I was unsure about what to do with the blog. In 2012 – two friends, fellow riding companions and occasional blog contributors spoke about converting the blog into a professionalized non-profit advocacy organization. I had no big vision beyond keeping an organization running in an all-volunteer capacity. And with encouragement from a dozen or so close confidants, friends and bike advocates – I decided to commit and steer BikeSD from a blog into a non-profit organization.

Back in May 2012 when our attorneys filed our incorporation paperwork, I had no idea what I had committed to. My assumption going into this was that I’d show up to a handful of meetings every month and make a case that would be along the lines of “don’t forget about us bicycle riders!” In addition to having to master the micro environment of this type of organization and my own leadership growth; I also had to understand and absorb the dynamics of advocacy. But while I remained the visible head of the organization, what the public couldn’t see were the many, many volunteers and advisors and mentors who guided every step of BikeSD’s and my journey.

A year after we launched, I went after every single low-hanging fruit and some far reaching ones too. We got political support for the issue and made bicycling a discussion in the mayoral race, became a city that adopted progressive design guidelines on transforming our streets (NACTO), implemented road diets, and more. Not knowing much about the dynamics of advocacy I approached the issue with a simple idea: what happens if I try and give this my best shot? Advocacy is an imperfect art. It requires dedicated, sustained effort and nerves of steel. Doing this work has been one of the most challenging, most difficult, most gut-wrenching endeavours I have ever attempted. But the work has to be done. Not just for the obvious environmental reasons but simply because bicycling makes our cities better places to live, work, and play.

A Professional Organization
Leading the emergence of BikeSD opened my eyes to a huge hole in our the organization’s advocacy approach – in order to win and attain changes on the ground, we as an organization had to grow and become professionalized. The status quo embedded within our societal culture and our national resistance needed to change

In the spring of 2014, we knew that BikeSD couldn’t sustain itself on the sheer passion and gumption of its many volunteers. We had to become a professionalized organization and begin to incorporate the broader San Diego community into our work. If we were to be successful in meeting our mission we needed to begin the process of professionalizing our organization. We began the process by going through a branding and marketing makeover, creating a business plan, hiring our first staffer and beginning work on our first five year strategic framework. It was time for me to collaborate with my board to set the governance and future direction of the organization.
Are you curious how we brought the leadership together around a common vision and a rapid-paced strategic planning process that resulted in action? Stay tuned to post 2 in this series.