Friends,
Thank you for your support for Streetsblog Los Angeles. Your support over the years has helped us be both an important independent non-profit media source and a voice for safer streets, better transit, more housing options for all, healthier communities, and equity and justice in planning. It has also given us the unique ability to do in-depth explorations of how the landscape created by past planning practices intersects with today's policy approaches and aims. We seek to raise $10,000 between Thanksgiving and the New Year. Thanks to your generous contributions on Giving Tuesday and over the past week, we have already raised over $1,200.
Every year, we ask for your support to help keep Streetsblog strong and independent in 2019 and beyond. Streetsblog receives support from The California Endowment, the Vida Feliz Foundation, The David Bohnett Foundation, and advertisement revenue from Foothill Transit, Pocrass and De Los Reyes LLC, Joshua Cohen Esq. the "Bicycling Attorney," the City of Santa Monica, and Metro. But it’s the individual donations from readers, some as small as $5 and one as large as $5,000, that make the difference and allow Streetsblog to be all that it can be.
If you’re already sold, you can make a donation by clicking the donation button:
2018 was another year where Streetsblog Los Angeles tackled issues at the policy and street level, from board rooms at Metro and in City Halls to the streets of South Los Angeles and everywhere else throughout the County.
Streetsblog also appeared on film. Joe Linton (and me, but mostly Joe) appeared in a Streetfilm about the transit challenges in Los Angeles. While Mayor Eric Garcetti and our city leadership present themselves and the city of Los Angeles as progressive leaders on transit and climate change, there's still much work that needs to be done. It's hard to believe that in 2018 Los Angeles still prioritizes cars over transit. It's especially egregious in corridors where single-occupant cars get in the way of efficient high-occupancy transit.
This was also a year we gave even greater than usual attention to the mobility concerns of young black men - the Angelenos that face the greatest set of constraints on their mobility, physical and otherwise - in the hopes of making clear how and why intersectionality in planning matters. In April, we began writing about Frederick "Woon" Frazier, a beloved young man who had taken up cycling to manage his diabetes and who was heartlessly run down on Manchester Boulevard. Sahra Sulaiman tracked his case from the moment word first went out on social media, to the rides his friends put together to honor his life and his mother's loss, to their attempts to see the driver brought to justice, to their efforts to engage elected officials and see tangible change manifest on the ground. She'll be finishing out the year with a look at how his family and friends are coping with his loss, their grief, the loss of income (Frazier helped support his mother), and their fears that - despite the identification of the woman who killed Frazier - justice will never be served.
Sahra also explored the challenges facing Slimm - a former gang member who had grown up near Frazier - who didn't have biking as an option as a youth, but had since taken up cycling to help get his life back on track. The barriers he faced were less about safety from cars and more about safety from gang violence and racial profiling by police - a legacy of the disenfranchisement his community continues to endure. She also wrote about what happened when his traumas eventually caught up with him and made hanging onto stable housing difficult and will follow up with what it means for the young son of Slimm's girlfriend to have been accepted into Slimm's bike club and given a chance for a healthier outlet than Slimm had.
Sahra also took an impressively deep dive into the history of segregation and disinvestment in the Vermont/Manchester area to get a better understanding of how efforts to improve mobility in the community - both physical and socio-economic - via a transportation boarding school might fare, particularly for black residents.
In all three cases, we worked to help readers and policymakers alike see how a deeper understanding of community context was essential to forging better, more sustainable solutions while still keeping important issues in the public eye.
All year, Streetsblog was breaking and covering news that other media outlets were missing. Streetsblog was the first to report on the Rowena Avenue road diet report (held for months after it was completed, and then released the day after a Streetsblog Los Angeles previewed its findings), cover the perilous 210 Freeway truck crashes onto the Gold Line tracks using the lens of Caltrans' insistence on getting in the way of Metro's planned safety upgrades, set the record straight on lawsuits levied by injured bicyclists, and shed light on many other important developments.
If you’d like to make a donation and don’t want to donate money online or through our web portal for whatever reason, there are other options. If none of these work, email damien@streetsblog.org and we will make sure we find a way to help you make a donation.
Make a donation through paypal, by sending the donation to damien@streetsblog.org.
You can donate bitcoin through a portal at our Santa Monica website : http://www.santamonicanext.org/make-a-donation/
Write a check and mail to: Streetsblog ℅ Damien Newton, 11539 National Blvd, LA, CA 90064.
Thanks again for all of your support. We can’t do Streetsblog without you.
