This week, CicLAvia staff and volunteers begin our door-to-door community outreach for the October 18 CicLAvia – Heart of LA route. This is the first of several direct conversations CicLAvia ambassadors will have to engage community members long before CicLAvia takes place.
While our outreach will serve the practical purpose of informing every business, residence, and religious or cultural institution on the route about CicLAvia, it’s also an invitation to members of the local community to work together to showcase their neighborhood to tens of thousands of CicLAvia participants.
Though other forms of outreach, such as meeting with business groups or neighborhood councils may begin as early as six months
before a route is even announced, our route notification outreach provides the opportunity for people along a route to chat one-on-one with staff and volunteers. For CicLAvia, these conversations help us to explain what CicLAvia is on a deep level.
For residents and businesses, this outreach (which is the first of two direct outreach efforts we undertake - 60 and 30 days before an event) may serve as the starting point for participating in CicLAvia. Participation could be as simple as enjoying the event the day it happens. It could also be as elaborate as putting together a party on the lawn of an apartment complex, offering business specials to attract shoppers or finding a way for a community group to get its message out to participants. In some cases, we even have groups that move their yearly festivals to coincide with CicLAvia Sunday.
We produce specific multilingual flyers that contain vital information about the route where people can find information about street closures, who they can contact if they have questions or want to find ways to participate. Additionally, our team will call each business that we are unable to have a one-on-one conversation with during route notification. The same goes for large apartment complexes and institutions. All of these efforts help our team create a flawless event.
Why do we put this many hundreds of hours into directly reaching out to people who live and work along each CicLAvia route? We do this because of those seven hours of smiles, fun, exercise, exploration and discovery on CicLAvia Sunday. We do this so we can see tens of thousands of people from all walks of life experiencing CicLAvia together during seven hours of pure joy in unique neighborhoods and count among them many people who live and work along the route.
If you would like to volunteer to do community outreach with CicLAvia, or volunteer in any other capacity, please follow this link.
