Women and Trans Programs

please see our talk page for what is needed on this page and for what projects people have claimed

Why Safer Spaces are Important!

For many of us on this wiki, this conversation is old hat. For anyone joining in and being curious about the why of WTF/FTW/W&T/Women's safer spaces, this space will serve as a means of understanding the need.

A good page with an okay primer as to why one might need/want safer spaces is Patriarchy and Bicycle Repair.

Suffice it to say that every bicycle space unless otherwise stated is a de facto "boys club" and many femme / trans folks report feeling more comfortable in safer spaces designed specifically for them.

Ideally, the goal is for an entire collective to participate in a safer space agreement at all times.

Community Bicycle Programs with Women And Trans (sometimes femme) safer spaces

at least according to our fine wiki circa Feb 2016

• Our Community Bikes
• Bike Dump
• BICAS (Tucson)
• Sopo Bike Coop ‎ (Atlanta)
• Troy Bike Rescue (Troy and Albany)
• Free Ride (Pittsburgh)
• Neighborhood Bike Works (Philadelphia)
• Salt Lake City Bicycle Collective
• Bike Pirates (Toronto)
• Edmonton Bicycle Commuters Society (Edmonton)
• Bike Kitchen (Vancouver)
• 1304 Bikes (Raleigh)
• Third Hand Bicycle Cooperative (Columbus)
• Bike City Recyclery (Fayetteville)
• Sacramento Bicycle Kitchen (Sacramento)
• Bikekitchen Vienna
• Bike Athens Bicycle Recycling Program (Athens)
• Ogden Bicycle Collective (Ogden)
• Recycle Cycles (Kitchener, ON, Canada)
• Bike Saviours Bicycle Collective (Tempe)
• VéloCity Bicycle Cooperative (Alexandria)
• Pedallers' Arms (Leeds)
• The Community Spoke! (Boston)
• San Francisco Yellow Bike Project (San Francisco)
• Pedal MCR (Manchester)
• Newark Bike Project (Newark)
• Hub City Cycles Community Co-operative (Nanaimo)
• Bicycle Collective (Utah)
• PEDAL (also not in the commuity bike shops list)
• Broken Spoke Bike Co-op (Oxford)
• RAD (Recycle A Dunger) (Christchurch)

Comments

I sent an email on the Think Tank recently that only barely made a mention of safer space programs, but a lot of what I talked about was based on years of thinking about how to make bike collectives more accessible to a wider variety of people, and probably a fair bit of wheel reinvention. To summarize, a tautology: the more you do to make a space accessible to more people, the less it will be exclusively the default demographic that shows up and sticks around.

Off the top of my head, and I'm happy to expand on any of these bullet points:

• access to basic food
• if music, multicultural music
• pedagogically-oriented learning environment
• value all work, including admin work
• safer space training for core volunteers
• upholding clear shop guidelines and boundaries for appropriate behavior
• providing an option for clearly defined volunteer tasks
• informative, accessible website
• have contact info for a mediator available
• physical shop safety
• being predictably and punctually open
• having a functioning, physical land line telephone in the shop

Even if every single moment in a bike collective was filled with people striving toward a safer space as best they could, there would still be a need for WTF night because the people who show up couldn't be expected to know that. Until I understood that, I spent a long time feeling uncomfortable about the concept of WTF nights because I believed (and continue to believe, actually) that it puts the burden of the work of thinking about issues surrounding equality largely on the hosts of the WTF nights, and then the rest of the collective often only thinks about safer spaces at their convenience, when I'd rather see every single member of a collective taking that burden on together and making every moment as much of a safer space as WTF nights. --Angel York (talk) 11:59, 16 February 2016 (PST)