The last few days have been a stretch of phone calls, meetings and emails to try to get Bike to Work Day together. This is the mundane and thankless part of advocacy. There are forms and those forms lead to other forms and it is an endless paper trail. Each and every step of the way there is a permission process or a gatekeeper keeping you from the person you have to talk to. For example, just to try to find out how I can set up an event on a local campus it took four phone calls from the Student Union, Programs Counsel, Special Events to the bookstore of all places.
It seems like it is always someone else's job to help you.
It seems like there is always too much to do and too few to do it.
It seems like even though you're trying to do something right someone is disgruntled, unhappy, dissatisfied or saying "no" without offering a solution.
Somehow, I thought that this would be easy. Get people together and do something. Act. Words into motion. Revolution. But that stuff is for the movies. Advocacy is a slow process. It is more of a war of attrition than a blitzkrieg.
I guess if advocacy were easy we'd be abounding in cycletracks by now.
1 comment:
I'm new to your blog, tell me about this bike to work day. It sounds like you're working pretty hard on it! It'll pay off, you know.. After all the paperwork :)
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