The A11Y program

Radio silence for a while, huh? Part one of that is that it's summer, it's been busy, and I've been personally overextended on a few fronts. Part two of that is do you realize how creatively bankrupt you can make yourself by writing 65 blog posts between mid March and late June? VERY creatively bankrupt, as it turns out! We were absolutely smoked from that. 

For some reason, our used-to-be incredibly reliable blog comment spam filter went off the rails and a ton of spam comments were getting through, so we've had to set the comment setting to "moderate" for the time being. Comments won't automatically go live, we will approve them. That doesn't mean we're going to filter out ones that we don't like or agree with - you should know that by now. Any legitimate comment that's got a perspective with commentary validity ("you guys are a-holes and I hate you" is a perspective of negligible commentary validity, so one like that would have to be a bridge we jump off when we get to it) will get approved. 

Last month, we decided that we wanted to do what we can to assist with inclusiveness in riding. We got pissed about how things are, we identified a bunch of stuff that needs addressing, and then we looked at some things we might be able to do to actually, you know, do something and make a difference. A big part of the leg work on this was finding the right people/organization/cause to support. There are a few good choices, but we had criteria. Though I have a man crush on the Williams brothers, putting our meager support behind Legion didn't seem like it would make too much of a difference to what they're up to. Plus it's predominantly racing focused, and it just seemed too easy to fall back on the "we'll just support the Williams brothers." We couldn't make a difference for them. 

There are others, too, and we were ready to say "close enough, this works" and just get the thing going. Perfect being the enemy of good, and all that. And then Mike found WTF Bike Explorers. It's as close to a perfect fit as we're going to get - their mission is spot with what we want to see, they have their act together, they make a difference, and the level of support we can reasonably hope to give will make a big difference for them. 

Having done the most half-assed of all half-assed merchandise programs (a few pairs of socks, some water bottles), our machinery for executing this is not well developed, but we're excited to give it a go. Our goal is to raise $5000 for WTF through net proceeds of merchandise sales. It's something of a huge task for us, but if we don't set a goal then we won't get anywhere and we're somewhat well versed in biting off a lot and then chewing like mad. 

We'll have the merchandise stuff built out soon, and we're working on an "in their own words" type deal with WTF to have them sell you their program. 

Lots more to flesh out with this, but we figured it was getting to "whatever happened to that.." time, and wanted to give a brief update.