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Final Days! Help us Raise $15,000 for our 15th Anniversary!

A note from Jeff Miller, Alliance President/CEO

imageAs you read this, I’m meeting with advocacy leaders back at the spot where I first met Susie Stephens.

In 1996, Susie and I were among the small handful of bicycle and pedestrian advocates who gathered at the Thunderhead Ranch. (That’s me, in the back row, third from the right. Susie is seated, third from the left.) We traveled to that remote site in Wyoming to share our individual experiences as local, grassroots leaders but discovered a collective movement that stretched across the continent. We made professional connections that advanced our work, but, because of visionaries like Susie Stephens, that gathering became much more than a simple networking session.

As a co-founder of the Alliance for Biking & Walking (originally the Thunderhead Alliance), Susie knew that we needed to create an organization that would serve local and state leaders with training, networking and resources to grow and strengthen their organizations. Click here for a video of Susie explaining the role and vision of the Alliance.

Energized by her leadership and inspired by her vision, the Alliance has made tremendous progress. This month, we’re celebrating our 15th anniversary and we need your help to keep our momentum going strong. Please celebrate with us by pledging your personal support today!

In honor of this milestone, a group of Alliance leaders have returned to the Thunderhead Ranch this week. At this important gathering, we’re celebrating our progress and reflecting on the current state of the movement. More importantly, we’re having the big-picture discussions that will chart the course of the Alliance and the bike/ped movement for the next 15 years. We need your help to make sure we have the resources to put that vision into action. Please donate today, so we can meet our goal of $15,000 by June 30!

For me, the gathering this week is bittersweet. I wish Susie were here with us, sharing her incredible insight and leading songs around the campfire. Unfortunately, Susie was struck and killed by a bus in 2003, and the movement lost one of its most inspiring leaders. But all of us are committed to continuing her work — in fact, we’re planting a Susie Tree here at the Thunderhead Ranch in her honor and memory. We know she’d be so proud of how far we’ve come and just as eager to keep building the Alliance. Honor Susie by helping the Alliance grow; please pledge your support today.

In 1999, Susie wrote a letter that summed up her commitment to the movement. “This bicycle stuff is my passion,” she told Randy Neufeld. “That simple and efficient little machine represents everything I believe in: sustainable living, a cleaner earth, egalitarianism and community. Also, I can think of no finer group of people to call my peers and mentors.”

Susie was right: There is no finer group of people than our People Powered Movement. I know we can count on you to make sure we continue this important work to make every community across North America a great place to bike and walk. Please make a pledge today.

Posted by Carolyn S on June 28, 2011
Tags: thunderhead ranch, susie stephens, 15th anniversary
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Honor Susie Stephens - Donate to our 15th Anniversary Fundraiser

 Nobody could inspire a crowd with word, song and spirit like Susie Stephens.

The Alliance for Biking & Walking was barely two years old when Susie took the podium at the 1998 Pro Walk Pro Bike conference in Santa Barbara (video). But, in less than 10 minutes, the advocate from Washington state conveyed the incredible power and promise of a new organization she co-founded at the Thunderhead Ranch.

It all started at that remote location in Wyoming in 1996, she explained, where a handful of bicycle and pedestrian advocacy leaders from across the continent gathered to share their experiences. It turned out to be much more than a simple retreat.

“We did a little bit of singing around campfires and a lot of advocacy training,” she told the conference crowd. “We got together two summers in a row and realized the most important thing we have is power. We represent political power… We realized we needed to formalize our rag-tag band of revolutionaries.”

And, thus, the Thunderhead Alliance — now the Alliance for Biking & Walking — was born.

True to character, Susie captured the reason and mission of the Alliance perfectly. If you look out at the mountains rising from the outskirts of Santa Barbara, she said, they look solid, permanent, impossible to move. “But drops of rain can, collectively, move mountains,” she said. “They may be perceived as strong, but they are, in fact, fragile. And we believe that the environment we’ve created, that puts cars first and bicycles and pedestrians last is equally fragile, that we can also bring down that perception, that we can change that paradigm and that it’s going to be one drop at a time.”

So the Thunderhead metaphor was perfect: A network of individual organizations, gathering energy, building capacity and creating the critical mass to create change on the ground in communities from coast to coast. The Alliance would be a source of collective knowledge and shared strength. It would be, in Susie’s words, “the delivery system of grassroots power.”

It was fitting that Susie was our first Managing Director, but tragically, her life was cut short when she was struck and killed while legally crossing the street in 2003. Since then, inspired and informed by her vision, we have continued her work. Her mother, Nancy McKerrow is still an integral part of the Alliance and says, “Susie would be so proud of the number of groups that are part of the Alliance. She’d be thrilled at how many have joined and realized the importance of working together.”

This month, we mark our 15th anniversary and the Alliance is stronger than even Susie could have imagined. We’ve grown from 12 to more than 170 member organizations. We are, as Susie suggested, moving mountains, making the way for bicyclists and pedestrian across North America. But we need your help.

Honor Susie by helping us raise $15,000 for our 15th anniversary. Give as little as $15 and you’ll receive a $200 discount on a VBT Bicycling and Walking Vacation. Give as much as $1,000 and Nancy will plant a commemorative Susie Tree in your honor. As Susie emphasized: Even a single drop adds to the thunderhead. Show your commitment by giving what you can to advance the movement for biking and walking.

In just a few weeks a small group of advocacy leaders will return to the Thunderhead Ranch in Wyoming to reflect on our incredible successes and identify concrete steps to accelerate that momentum. We know Susie would be buzzing with excitement, eager to strategize for a better future and, of course, sing around the campfire. Make sure the Alliance has the resources to put the ideas and strategies from that pivotal meeting into action: Donate today!

At the start of her presentation to that 1998 crowd, Susie shared a song that she and Randy Neufeld had written under the stars at that first Thunderhead gathering. By the end of her talk, she had the whole room singing with her: “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around... I’m gonna keep on walkin', keep on bikin', gonna build a brand new world!”

Well, we’re not going to let anyone turn us around either. We going to keep on walking, keep on biking, keep on building that better world that Susie envisioned.

Help us do that by donating today!

Posted by Carolyn S on June 02, 2011
Tags: thunderhead ranch, susie stephens, alliance for biking & walking, 15th anniversary
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Advocates Honor Susie Stephens’ Birthday with Tree Planting in St. Louis

imageAt long last, a living memorial now grows in the city of Susie Stephens’ tragic death.

Had she not been struck and killed by a bus while legally crossing the street in St. Louis during a conference in 2002, Susie would have turned 46 years old young this past Saturday, April 16. To commemorate and honor her joyful and lasting legacy, a handful of bike/ped advocates planted a Susie Tree in the shadow of the iconic Gateway Arch.

As many of you know, Susie was not just a co-founder of the Alliance; she was an inspiration to all who knew her. She was a passionate bicyclist and environmentalist, who celebrated life through song and advocacy and, above all, believed that the tough work of making the world a better place is best done with a smile on your face.

After her death, Susie’s mom, Nancy MacKerrow, started the Susie Forest project, planting trees around the globe to memorialize Susie’s indominable spirit. Sinking roots into the city where Susie passed was a long-held hope for MacKerrow and her family. This weekend, a trio of advocacy groups — Trailnet, the Great Rivers Greenway and the Missouri Bicycle and Pedestrian Federation — helped to make that hope come true.

“This will provide some closure to a terrible incident that happened in St. Louis in 2002,” Brent Hugh, Executive Director of the Missouri Bicycle and Pedestrian Federation, said in a press release before the event. “Susie was killed just about the time I was getting interested in bicycle and pedestrian issues, and it had a profound impact on me and on our work at the Missouri Bicycle and Pedestrian Federation.”

On the blog for the Susie Forest project, MacKerrow described the weekend as bittersweet.

“The trip to St Louis was wonderful but hard,” MacKerrow wrote. “It was hard to show Jack and Becky [Susie’s brother and sister] the corner where Susie was killed and hard to walk where she had walked to the Gateway Arch on her last evening. Somehow the cold and windy and rainy weekend seemed appropriate. And yet the flowers and the emerging leaves on the trees also seemed appropriate.

After getting to bed at 2:45 am because of a late plane, it was a groggy threesome that trudged to the arch on Friday morning to watch Susie’s tree go into the ground. The planting crew had to listen to my Susie spiel and look at the pictures and maps, but they were rewarded with tree-kibbles, which they deserved because they planted the Bur Oak correctly.

On Saturday the people from Great Rivers Greenway and Trailnet who made this planting possible came to dedicate this tree to Susie and to wish her happy birthday. None of them knew her, but had heard wonderful things about her. It was very emotional to hear them speak about her influence. We wrote tree-grams, which we hung temporarily in the tree for picture-taking because they are not allowed in national parks. They will be hung in Spokane’s mystery birthday tree when I find it. Someone suggested that I put my tree-gram under the mulch we shoveled. I like that idea because the disintegrating paper will feed the roots and send my thoughts through the entire tree. Perhaps I will do this for every anniversary tree I plant.

I don’t know how to thank the wonderful, welcoming people of Missouri for making this dream of mine come true.”

Read more about the Susie Forest Project here.