Common Ground - sharing the road, sharing the pedal, sharing the community

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Common Ground by Home for Cooperation       No comments    Created Date: 07/05/2020

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Proposal code: Pusula / Ππούσουλας-2020-05-121

We want to build a community space that will welcome all, by focusing on bike movement as a social and enabling action to leave a greener footprint on the world and support less visible groups.

Our aim through this initiative is to create a community ground with a particular focus on building an urban bicycle culture to promote 3 pillars of sustainability in Cyprus. It is a social, environmental and economic action that in the particular context of Nicosia and Cyprus also aims to bring communities from around the island/across the divide together over values that connect us as world citizens. We want to promote urban bicycle mobility as a potential solution to a number of contemporary problems that would also contribute to community building. Our vision through a four year project is to create a bridge between the communities to meet, interact and learn from each other by organizing bike and walking tours, establishing a repair mechanism for bikes and wheelchairs and providing an office for community related social action projects and initiatives. The Common Ground project aims to foster regional cooperation, strengthen ties among members of the local community across the divide, create a network of support and collaboration, with the ultimate goal of cultivating a sense of identity and community among people who use bicycles as a means of transport, as a choice or a necessity, for recreational and environmental purposes as well as engaging with the mobility impaired community of the city.

Our activities involve a four-year plan to establish our core activities and services. The project is going to be implemented by the team behind Home for Cooperation and Association for Historical Dialogue and Research with its already hand-on experience on supporting and organizing these activities. The sustainability of this project will be achieved by the participation fees to our tours and the bike rentals that will start after establishing the project during year one. Initially, we will work on organizing the space, contacting all the actors and partners involved and planning the tours. During the first year, we also aim to continue our already established tours while working to setup our repairing services. This initiative will invite experienced technicians to visit our space on a weekly basis to fix bikes and wheelchairs. In order to establish this, we will need to either hire experienced people or run small workshops to teach new people. By the end of this year, we want to run a repair service for wheelchairs and bicycles on a weekly basis where the community can fix their vehicles. We will also have an open call for new collaborations to work on our social action program by non-formal groups and established NGOs that can support and benefit from this space. Our plan is to add value to our already established space by bringing these groups together, give them support and help them in ways that are in sync with our vision for this project.

In the final stages of our implementation plan, we aim to double our monthly cycling and walking tours by our already established experienced network of guides. During these tours and other organised dates, we will begin a training program for both advanced and beginner tour guides.

To sum up, our initiative to establish the Common Ground focusing on cycling as an urban social movement includes a diverse set of practices that aim to create change and build a community through a sustainable approach touching upon environmental, social, and economic pillars. By developing this 4 year project we will promote bicycle consciousness through a community space that will welcome all. This space will be the common ground for meeting and carrying out activities that bring the community together through bike and walking tours while underlining the importance of sharing and understanding our city, repairing services for wheelchairs and bikes, and an office for community related social action projects.