Women on Bikes: WABA’s New Outreach Campaign

This post is part of WABA’s Women on Bikes program, an ongoing campaign to create a community, share resources, and develop strategies for getting more women on bikes. To read about the project so far, click here to check out the WABA blog. To learn more and sign up to receive emails about this project, click here.
By Kiera Zitelman & Laura Jean Shane, WABA’s Women’s Bicycling Interns 

WABA is proud to introduce our new Women’s Bicycling Outreach and Advocacy campaign, Women on Bikes.

It’s a fact: Women in our region bike less than men. We learned from the Women’s Forum last winter that WABA needs to step up and do something about it. So we’ve been hard at work developing a plan. With spring in the air and bike month on the way, now is the time to get moving. Now is the time to bring together the women in your life that say, “I’m interested in biking , but…” Women on Bikes is WABA’s new approach to women’s bike outreach and for this to work we need your help. Our goal is to help women who bike for recreation/fitness to become transportational bicyclists and we plan to do it by bringing women together. We want to reach out to you, your best friend, your aunt, your co-worker, your favorite women of all ages and experience levels–whether they already bike or have only thought about biking.  We’re asking you to become our Bike SpokesWomen. To us, a Bike SpokesWoman is a bicyclist who sees the benefits of more women on bikes and wants to step up and help make it happen. This campaign will truly be only as successful as our ability to get new faces in the room or in the bike lanes! That’s where Bike SpokesWomen come in. You can be a bike buddy and mentor, and you can turn a recreational rider into a city rider by bringing her along for the ride to our events and to bike rides and outings throughout the region.

How to Get Involved

So we’re asking two favors of you, our Bike SpokesWomen:
  1. We need you to sign up for our email updates. You can do that here.
  2. And we need you to bring one woman–just one!–to a Women on Bikes event. You can use our handy Tell-A-Friend tool to start the conversation.
The Women on Bikes campaign consists of educational meet-ups, bike classes, and friendly rides that will seek to address the concerns of new transportational bicyclists. These FREE events will present opportunities to turn the interested but concerned riders in your life into confident, effective street riders.

Women on Bikes Events

The action begins this weekend: On Saturday, April 7th, we are hosting our first Women on Bikes Meet-up, a conversation about bikes. We want you—our friends and cyclists—to bring along a woman you know who wants to ride and who has questions and concerns. The event is designed to present useful information in a fun and social setting. Sign up for Women on Bikes email updates to learn how to register for this and future events. Become a BikeSpokesWomen now! Then pass along the invitation.
Laura Jean Shane is a spring 2012 Women’s Bicycle Outreach & Advocacy Intern. She  came to WABA as a former sports medicine professional and current Masters of Public Health student at GWU. A devotee of RAGBRAI, she moved to DC last year and cannot imagine getting around any other way.
Kiera Zitelman is a spring 2012 Women’s Bicycle Outreach & Advocacy Intern. She has gotten around the DC area by bike for years since growing up in Silver Spring. As an environmental science and policy student at UMD, she uses her bike to navigate campus every day and ride the Anacostia Tributary trails near College Park on the weekends.