Town Team Movement, in partnership with the Western Australia State Government, Main Roads Western Australia and the Western Australian Local Government Association (WALGA), have launched the new Streets Alive program. The program provides $5 million over 5 years for capacity building and support for eligible community organisations and local governments for projects designed to calm traffic on local roads in urban areas across Western Australia.
If you're in Western Australia, you can register your Project Idea now! The first step offers potential ‘seed’ grants of up to $5,000 incl. GST in all towns and neighbourhoods across WA for eligible community groups. The project ideas can include traffic calming initiatives and community-led activations, such as: road murals, active transport infrastructure, street furniture, parklets, planter boxes, community gardens, street art, pop-up libraries and street parties. Future funding rounds will assist larger projects. Find out more by clicking here.
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How’s it going advocating for better transport and places?
Advocating for better walking spaces, bike friendly routes and great places to hang out in can be draining, frustrating – and challenging! It’s a long game. Downheartedness can infect other areas of your life despite your best intentions to be upbeat. Do you want to smell the roses again? Feel less tired? More optimistic when you read emails? Hear yourself be more positive in your conversations? Feel that life has a fresher flavour? It’s possible. A daily mindfulness practice can help support you to bounce back more easily. There are decades of high-quality research into the psychological benefits of mindfulness even in very challenging circumstances. Here’s what’s on offer. A weekly mindfulness class with a short inspiring talk, a guided mindfulness sit and easy ways to start a daily mindfulness practice to continue when the course ends. There’ll be an opportunity to stay online after each session to chat with others in advocacy. Registration details: The class is online. Register here for the meeting details link (you’ll need a Google account). When? Six Wednesdays on 5, 12, 19, 26 June, 3, 10 July 2024 at 6.30 - 7:30 pm Brisbane time (AEST) for an hour with an optional 30 mins to connect with others in transport advocacy and ask questions. What do you need? You don’t need to have experience. Just bring an open-mind and enough video bandwidth to see each other. This is a course requirement for a 2-year Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program and if you find it supports you and buffers against burnout, we'll continue. Who’ll be guiding you? Wendy Nash has a diploma of Insight & Compassion Meditation Teaching, a Somatic Psychotherapy Diploma and a Bachelor of Psychology (Hons). Her honours research project studied the effect of loving-kindness practices on kindness towards others. She’s practised mindfulness for over 20 years with internationally renowned teachers in Australia, Europe and North America and her approach is to make mindfulness easy to apply in daily life. Full Disclosure: This is a course requirement for a 2-year Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program for Wendy. Wendy started Get Around Cabo Carfree because the public and active transport options in Caboolture, South East Queensland, usually led to lots of swearing about the transport situation. Her long-standing mindfulness practice helps her keep sane and she hopes others will find it equally beneficial. Please feel welcome to ask any questions to hello@GetAroundCaboCarfree.com.au and invite others who might be interested. Pedalling Progress: Resilience and Innovation at the 2WalkAndCycle Conference in Wellington4/4/2024 If you haven’t been to Wellington, New Zealand, in the past few years, I highly recommend visiting to see the transformation the city has undergone. Everywhere you go you see all sorts of people zipping around on a bicycle or a cargo bike, there are connected cycleways forming a network and more in construction to be delivered within the financial year. Last month Sara Stace (WSP and Better Streets president) and I, Jullietta Jung (GDCI and Better Streets board member), were in Wellington to present at the 2024 2WalkAndCycle conference and heard from Wellington City Council’s transitional team lead Claire Pascoe and engagement manager Oli du Bern talk about the (stormy) journey that they went through to achieve the rapid roll out. They spoke of a “trust fund” they decided to invest in. They decided they needed to invest in building trust with the community, leadership and industry if they were to deliver 100 kms of cycleways in 3 years. They invested and reaped the returns. The invested in iterative designs processes with community engagement and adaptive implementation through consultation. If the Wellington story wasn’t enough, the conference gathered minds from around the country doing impactful projects in the community. Seeing the representation of Māori people in projects, leading projects, and several projects that featured youth engagement was another stand out of the conference.
Then if that wasn’t enough the conference featured two internationally acclaimed keynote speakers Janette Sadik Khan (former transport commissioner of New York City, famous for transforming Time Square and Broadway to people friendly places, read her book Street Fight) and Salvador Rueda (Barcelona’s Superblocks, watch how you can transform your neighbourhood with a line). Their stories of the transformational projects that they have led over the years drew whistles from the crowd and were hugely energising. These inspiring stories are even more celebrated as the crowd needed hope. In the backdrop of the conference there is a draft Government Policy Statement that halves the budget for walking and cycling, gone are the days of unfettered support for initiatives like Streets for People. Paradoxically, it may be precisely this adversity that seemed to fuel the energy of the crowd. Listen to Janette Sadik-Khan tell the New York CIty story in Auckland here. |
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