| October
2005 |
|
Message from New Orleans: 'The Unseen Faces of Bicycling' Bicycling Advocacy Around the Globe: London Who Knows Where the Traffic Goes? Oak Park Shop By Bike a Winner New Faces in Bicycling Advocacy |
Summer Jobs on Wheels If Woody Allen was correct when he said, “80 percent of success is showing up,” then Jaime Miller has a significant advantage over many of her fellow high school graduates. Not only has she discovered the most reliable way to get places in the face of soaring gas prices and intensifying road congestion, she is “showing up” with concrete, marketable skills as a result of participating recently in an extra-curricular program that led to a summer job with Mayor Daley’s Junior Bicycling Ambassadors. Miller is one of 10 youths the Ambassadors recruited from an after-school, bike-building workshop for teens from the Logan Square and Garfield Park neighborhoods, called Build and Ride. The program, which gives teens a chance to develop job skills like teamwork and problem-solving, was offered to students through the partnership of After School Matters, the Chicago Park District, the Chicago Department of Transportation, the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation, Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Public Library.
The Junior Bicycling Ambassadors assisted the five full-time Mayor Daley’s Bicycling Ambassadors. Paired up, the teens scoured the city with their full-time Bicycling Ambassador team leaders, teaching bicycle safety to an estimated 10,000 children at 117 Park District day camps over a period of six weeks. For Miller, a June graduate of Roberto Clemente High School and now an employee of CBF, the experience was transformative. Not only was she quickly immersed in getting around Chicago solely by bicycle, she said she was compelled to “develop the skills I needed to not be afraid to communicate with people on different levels. “I had to, then. I had no choice,” she said. It wasn’t long before the students recognized and seized leadership opportunities. Miller remembers that it was during a break between groups at a Northwest Side day camp that she and her partner, Marcos Orta, were cast unexpectedly in the role of authoritative presenters of information. Their team leader, Bicycling Ambassador Kevin Mitchell, left them alone for a few minues, or so he thought. “A group of kids started walking toward us,” Miller recounted. “And we were like, ‘OK, they’re coming. Where’s Kevin? We need Kevin to start us off.’ “We didn’t want them to wait,” Miller said. “So, we took it into our own hands to begin giving a presentation. We introduced ourselves. Asked them what they think we’re here for. Started a conversation. “It made me and, I’m guessing, Marcos feel confidence in ourselves,” said Miller. Eve Jennings, director of the Ambassadors program, expressed pride in the teens. “In the beginning of the season, I told them that they were pioneers. There had never been a Junior Ambassadors team before, and this is the only peer-to-peer bicycle education program like it in North America. “The teens took the challenge to make this summer a success, and they ran with it,” Jennings said.
The work, which paid $9.33 per hour, also changed Miller’s physical relationship with her world and opened a path to independence. As Miller explained, she never rode a bike much before this. Mostly, she was driven everywhere, or took the bus. “I became more physically able to do different things,” she said. “Like, I walked here today. I didn’t like to walk up the block, before. I was always in the car. Now I’m walking more, and biking more.” The city’s distances now appear manageable to her. “I had to adjust, get eating down, plenty of water. And as time went on … you tell me to ride to 55th? OK, that’s nothing. And I’m not even busting a sweat.” Miller said she realized that, in bicycling, there is a quality of being in a given place that she finds lacking when she takes a car or bus there. “I can say that I’ve been to the Sears Tower,” Miller said. “That’s kind of common, everyone I know has gone to the Sears Tower. But no one actually has.” Having covered hundreds of miles as a Junior Ambassador, she now bikes each day from her home in Pilsen to her temporary job at CDOT headquarters, where she assists with Mayor Daley’s Safe Routes Ambassadors (another partnership between CBF and CDOT) before heading off to college to study interior design. “I’m downtown a lot, now; and I see buildings that,
when I’m in my house all the way in another part of the city,
I look at. I can see these buildings from there, and now I’m
right here next to them. David Callahan is managing editor of Bike Traffic
|
