Making our streets places for people includes making sure black and brown people feel safe from harassment, traffic violence, and police brutality.
Like many of you, we are saddened by the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd. We also grieve for the families of Ryan Stokes and Cameron Lamb. We express our condolences to their loved ones, and support their call to justice. The individuals who killed them must be held accountable.
BikeWalkKC’s mission includes making our streets places for people. All people, but especially black and brown people, should feel safe and comfortable using our city streets as public spaces for recreation, transportation, protest, and more. They should be able to do this without fear of harassment, traffic violence, or police brutality.
BikeWalkKC wants to make those words true for everyone who knows at this moment that they are not true. We owe that to our employees. We owe it to our neighbors and our partners. Fundamentally, we owe it to our community to make the statement “Black Lives Matter” a reality for all who walk, bike, or roll.
As a majority-white organization, we know that our actions mean more than our words and we will continue to fight for equity inside and outside our organization. We ask our partners and stakeholders to help us hold ourselves accountable in our work:
Our policy agenda calls for equity to be at the heart of all decisions about where and how to invest resources in the local transportation system, public spaces, and other parts of the public realm. Importantly it supports efforts to bring local control to the KCPD.
Our education and outreach programs prioritize communities dealing with effects of systemic racism. We have one of the country’s largest Safe Routes to School programs, which is focused on schools in the urban core and low income suburbs.
We work with public health departments to address our built environment as a social determinant of health like poverty, hunger, education, and medical care – all factors that are compounded by systemic racism.
These protests happened because people feel like they aren’t being seen or heard. To our black and brown neighbors and partners: we see you, we hear you, and we will continue to support you as we fight against racial injustice together.