World Streets Emergency: Time to get behind World Streets and push

After seven months of proving its worth day after day, bringing carefully selected news, expert views, comments and leads serving more than ninety thousand visitors from more than fifty countries on all continents, World Streets is reaching out to get support. We need your help to continue. So it's time for you to dig in and (1) subscribe, (2) support and (3) get involved.

* Context: But first, if you have not yet got to this, click here to read the letters of support coming in from one hundred Principal Voices of sustainable transportation worldwide.

Contents:
1. To subscribe
2. Sponsorship, Institutional support
3. Personal gifts, donations
4. How to make your contribution
5. Other forms of support (content, technical)

1. To subscribe

World Streets is freely available to all who are looking to understand and support the sustainability agenda. There is an option for a modest paid subscription for those who chose to.

* To enter your subscription for 2009 click - http://tinyurl.com/ws-subscribe

2. Supporting World Streets/Sponsorship

We are going to need significant financial support if World Streets is to continue. This is clear without a doubt. Despite the many volunteers pitching in with ideas, articles and encouragement, our programs are still costly to run and require an annual budget on the order of EUR 100,000 to get the job done. (There is a lot going on here, the iceberg under the tip, which is needed for the journal and which you never see, including management and oversight of all that goes into maintaining the New Mobility Agenda focus programs and sites – see www.program.newmobility.org to get an idea on that.)

Institutional partnerships

• Cities are our natural partners.
They are the ones closest to the issues and who make the decisions that count. Via the daily journal we supply them with a carefully selected, easy to digest, steady flow of information, insight, clues and feedback from world experts that would cost them many times more than the annual subscription to develop on their own. It also gives them a chance to make their voice heard on a worldwide forum.

Our goal is to cover a substantial portion of operating costs through these dynamic partnerships, targeting to get the support of one hundred world cities of all sizes at affordable rates. Subscribing cities are invited to bring in one city from the developing countries as part of their subscription.

• Public agencies and associations: At the state, national or regional level, these institutions can provide valuable services to the community by helping make Streets available in their service area and to their members. There is important potential for co-organizing seminars, workshops and events in support of sustainable transport projects and groups taking the lead in their area.

• Transport operators are natural partners too, and chief among them the larger and more dynamic public transport providers, other service providers and the more active associated management groups.

• Private sector: This is more delicate, but is appropriate for companies and organizations who are firmly committed to the sustainable transport agenda. Suppliers of goods and services in such areas as insurance, non-motorized transport, carsharing, liftsharing, strategic parking, logistics, buses, delivery services, locational systems, integrated multi-modal ticket/access systems, transport logistics, spatial planning, and specialized consultant and research groups are appropriate.

Foundation support
As we develop longer-term partnerships for support, one-off gifts and donations will go a long way to help us fund our early operational and start-up costs in this crucial first phase. We are particularly hopeful for the support of foundations, groups with such budgets, and well-to-do individuals who share our sense of mission. If you are among them, please contact us for more information. If you know someone we should contact for discussions, please let us know.

Donors
An important form of support is starting to come in from individuals and families who share our concerns, and who are ready to reach into their pockets to give proof that the struggle for sustainable cities must engage us all. Add your voice.

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3. Personal contributions, gifts

This level of funding normally can come only from foundations, public agencies, or well-to-do individuals. But there is scope for smaller, more strategic donations as well, and here is maybe where you will have some ideas. Your counsel and initiative will be helpful in several ways.

• By making a contribution - large or small - you are sending us a strong signal that what we are doing has value.

• Your contributions will help us to fund the diversity of our existing programs at the quality level and frequency you are used to.

• An active contributor base helps us equally to turn to the foundations, agencies, and individuals that can make more sizable contributions to help us make-up a budget shortfall.

But there is possibly an even more important reason for you to make your voice heard in this way. World Streets and the New Mobility Agenda are voices of the sustainable cities movement that have an international role and high visibility, including in your country and city. If you can help register strong votes of support for these new approaches in this way (and we are talking about the smallest symbolic contribution that technology permits), this message is going to have even stronger international impact.

Some of you have asked how much to give. The possible range, a range that is useful for us, is in fact enormous. If you are a student or struggling to make ends meet in a poor city or country, even one dollar would be loaded with significance. Please don't be embarrassed or shy. It is a wonderful way to join in. Your small contribution carries a very big message.

The annual subscription cost of course is € 29/US$ 39 – that's a module to consider. And if your circumstances permit you to easily double or more that, then this is really starting to help.

Looking at it from the other end, our daily costs run on the order of $500.00 Which quickly adds up to a couple of thousand dollars a week, four times that for the month, and for the year . . . well you already have that figure. Those are modules that some of you at least may wish to consider if your resources permit.
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4. How to make your contribution:

To make payment by credit card or PayPal, please click the Support icon immediately below and follow the directions if you are not a seasoned user of PayPal.

The following routine works both for payment by credit card or by PayPal.

1. Step 1 is to stay on the left half of the payment form and consistently ignore all of the right column references to opening up a new PayPal account. (Unless that is what you wish to do.)

2. Once you have indicated the amount of your donation, and then clicked the "Update Totals" link, the next step is to proceed to the bottom left where just above the small credit card facsimiles you will see the "Continue" link.

3. If you click "Continue" it brings you to the "Pay With Credit Card" page which you treat in a standard Internet manner. At that point on the succeeding frames all you have to do is Verify the billing information and the fact you wish to make a contribution. That's it.

Direct bank transfers:

And if for any reason that should not work or you prefer otherwise, another option is to make a direct bank payment. Here are our billing details for wire transfers:

Account Holder: Association EcoPlan International
Account no. 00010465401
Crédit Industriel et Commercial de Paris
Succursale BR (Montparnasse)
202 Blvd. Raspail / 75014 Paris, France
SWIFT: CMCIFRPP
IBAN : FR763006610621000146540105

Finally, if you prefer to send a check direct our mailing address is:

Association EcoPlan International
8/10, rue Joseph Bara
F75006 Paris, France

You can make your check payable to Association EcoPlan International
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5. Other forms of support:

If you have spent some time with World Streets you will probably have noticed that it is a thoroughly collaborative operation, with friends and partners from many different places around the world contributing in many different ways. So far so good. But we also need other forms of help of a more specific kind, if we are to make World Streets into a truly effective instrument in support of the sustainable transport agenda worldwide

At this point let me just list the main areas in which help is going to be most useful, and invite you to work your way down this list, and if you see an area in which you have the skills and the desire to pitch in, please do get in touch so that we can discuss how this might work.

Before you dig in however let me point out that while this is a great and exciting series of challenges, the only reward for doing them will be your satisfaction. It is a great and challenging job, but there is no pay and no obligations really, other than to pitch in where your skills and time permit. But we can promise that you will be in great company.

Now on to the areas in which your help is needed:

Content
* Reporters/Authors
* Reviewers
* Editors
* Translators
* Eyes on the Street Sentinels
* Speakers Bureau, organization of

Media:
* Illustrators
* Photographers
* Videographers
* Streetscape models
* Scenario writers
* Podcasting
* Editors
* Producers

Tech support (Web):
* Webmasters and blog experts
* Map maintenance
* Eyes on the Street program maintenance
* Blog liaison

Partners for new language/country editions
* See Italian version, Nuova Mobilità here (Under construction)

Fundraising
* Through web
* Direct representations
* Viral fundraising

Project partners (for joint projects, editions)

At this point perhaps it will be a most efficient of your time if we leave this a simple list without going into any more details explanations here, leaving that for the next stage of communication in case you wish to get in touch to discuss how you might help out. You know how to get in touch. I hope we shall be hearing from you.

Eyes on the Street:
But there is more to this than money. What about pitching in and join our World Eyes on the Street Observatory?. No obligation, no time required (and no pay), but we do want you to at least be looking and thinking about it. More on Eyes at http://newmobilityagenda.blogspot.com/2009/03/world-streets-correspondents.html.
 

For the rest, thank you in advance for your contributions, counsel and support. Believe me, we will not be able to do this without you!

Eric Britton
Editor, World Streets

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