Why independent sponsorship and support is needed

The nature of our work is that external funding and support are necessary. Take but one of our numerous programs by way of example: the New Mobility Policy Dialogues lecture/outreach tour.

The costs of organizing such events is not inconsequential, and for the host city the expenses for personnel and supporting services can be fairly substantial. Beyond this are the costs of bringing the representative(s) of the New Mobility Agenda to the city, the various associated costs and coverage of staff and support costs involved creates another set of bills. As a result of this double-edged invoice, and also given the innovative nature of the issues and choices under examination, the full bill for one of these city projects can be a significant hindrance to participation. Thus, you have here just one example of why external funding is need to advance the program.

However it turns out that ours is an uncomfortable message in at least three defining ways, which makes it difficult for a pioneering program such as ours to gain support from the more familiar established interests. As you will quickly understand if you review the materials presented here, there are a handful of common themes underlying all this work. Uncomfortable themes in many ways, it turns out:

For starters, we insist that, given the overarching seriousness of the climate emergency, the time horizon for action and expenditure in our cities should be radically reduced to the two to four years immediately ahead. This means that the large expensive construction projects that have traditionally been pushed by established interests and in general the ways of doing things in the sector are now going to have to be laid aside. At least until such time that we have made sufficient progress on the climate related problems, which should be among our major priorities in this and indeed all other sectors of the economy and society.

So instead of all those time-honored big-ticket construction projects, or sitting around and waiting passively for the decades needed for the promise of technological progress to bring us new fuels, new motors, new vehicles, new systems, within the new mobility perspective we are obliged instead to identify, plan and orchestrate very large numbers of many often very small things. Now, it turns out to be a lot easier to get support for one big familiar thing - that big magic wand -- than for many small and often less familiar things. However the reality of our present emergency situation is that we need to learn how better to identify and coordinate all the many small things that now need to be done.

Given the dedication of the group over all these years to representing the public interest in ways which are at once thoroughly independent, which call for far-reaching pattern-break changes in both strategies and expenditures, and which as such are not allied or compliant with the mainline groups and interests that have traditionally dominated the sector-- this means that independent sources of finance are needed. Which is perhaps where you come in.

World City Bike Internship program

To make this less abstract let's take a quick look at the last and most recent of on-going World City Bike Collaborative project, for which basically two levels of funding support will be both welcome and necessary.

• Program support: In the first instance it is necessary to find ways to pay for the underlying program development which underwrites the internships themselves. Maintaining the program requires on the order of $5,000/month to keep it going.

• City bike internship program: In addition, it would be helpful if we were able to help fund all or parts of these two-month internships so that we can put expertise to work in as large a number of cities as possible. The cost of a city internship varies from $10,000 up to $20,000, depending on the amount of time and level of resources required. And despite the fact that once the decisions has been made to proceed with one of these systems which in the case of medium sized and larger deployments means program costs measures in the tens of millions of dollars, there tends to be considerable resistance to spending one thousandth of these sums early on in the planning and decision process to ensure informed and wise decisions. Hence, it would be useful if we could offer considering cities some form of support for the internships.

Prizes and Awards

Those of you who know us will be aware that one of the ways in which we try to contribute to the advance of the Sustainability Agenda world wide is by supporting as best we can prize awards and other ways of drawing attention to path-breaking projects that are particularly deserving, both for what they are managing to accomplish in their own chosen patch and as examples that will encourage emulation by others. This takes the form of direct collaboration and networking from here to gin up publicity and support. And when we can, support via fund-raising from cooperating Foundations, public agencies and concerned individuals ready to step forward and lend their support to these worthy causes. Thus on two occasions we were fortunate to have the support of the Shell Foundation for important international events: the first for the 2002 meeting of the Stockholm Partnerships for Sustainable Cities, and most recently in support of the 2005 World Technology Awards for Environment (2006). We very much appreciate these partnerships and are hopeful that we shall be able to contribute to them in the future to an even grater degree. Site optimized for browsing with Explorer 6+ and best viewed with resolution of 1024 x 768 The Commons has welcomed international visitors since 3 July 1995. Europe: 8/10 rue Joseph Bara 75006 Paris, France, Europe. T: +331 4326 1323 USA : 9440 Readcrest Dr., Los Angeles, CA 90210. T: +1 310 601-8468 Copyright © 1994-2009 The Commons ® Last updated on 22 January 2009