Best Practices for Walk/Bike/Roll Groups

Getting started

Developing a mission statement

It clarifies what you are seeking to achieve and keeps you on track—you can think of a mission or vision statement like the group's north star
It gives you something to say when you're talking to other people about the group, including folks you might want to get involved
It serves as the top-level "goal" for the group, allowing you to generate more detailed, lower-level, achievable objectives that ladder up to it

A mission statement is a concise, operational statement of what you're looking to achieve. Below are a few mission statement examples from similar groups. Feel free to use these for inspiration:

Local Motion - Making it safe, accessible, and fun for everyone to bike, walk, and roll in Vermont.
Walk/Bike Randolph - We're working towards a Randolph in which all members of our community have access to our public spaces and can walk and bike safely and comfortably.
The Brattleboro Coalition for Active Transportation works to promote safe, healthy, accessible transportation for people of all abilities, ages, and incomes.

Something you'll notice about all of those statements is that they are all sentences you could recite in response to "what does your organization do?" Try to condense it down into a sentence or two so that you can concisely describe the group to people who have no idea what it's all about.

Here's an example of what your group's mission statement might sound like:

Safe Routes South Hero is working to help kids to get to school by advocating for safe streets, paths, and trails.
We advocate for safer routes for walking, biking, and rolling in South Hero.

The benefits of a strategic plan

Once you have a mission statement in place, it is often helpful to develop a strategic plan that outlines and tracks what the group is working on. The process for developing a strategic plan should be collaborative and engage members of the group. This process often generates a lot of ideas for focus areas, all of which are good to capture in an initial draft.

The plan then serves as a document to track progress on initiatives, and also as a place to put things that are worthwhile, but that no one in the group is able to focus on currently. It should be considered a living document—one that you return to and reference to guide your activities throughout the course of a year and over the long term.

It’s best to keep the strategic plan concise and easily digestible so that volunteers are not intimidated when they see it, and feel encouraged to get engaged with initiatives. One way to achieve this is to use a spreadsheet format with one tab for “active” initiatives, which are projects the group is actively working on, and a second for “inactive” initiatives, which are projects that have been proposed or that the group is interested in pursuing but which no one has volunteered to work on or aren’t timely.

Here’s an example strategic plan, which you are welcome to copy and adjust for your group.

Staying on track
- Maintaining a work plan
- Recruiting new members
- Reporting to selectboard