We read The Atlantic’s report on an Australian study of sitting this morning, and it brought us to our feet. 

We’re declaring today to be Stand Up for Trails Day! Here’s how you can participate:

1. Share this tumblr post!

2. Go to our Facebook page and share the link to The Atlantic with your friends. Let them know it’s Stand Up for Trails Day!

3. Check out the hard working organizations in our Facebook Likes who are bringing more walking, running and biking opportunities to Illinois.  Pick one to Like. Heck, Like them all!

5. Retweet The Atlantic article to your followers - here’s our tweet about it.

5. Then holy cow—get out of the chair and get outdoors!

Hello and happy holidays, my friend in Illinois trails!

I’m writing this on a brilliant and sharply chilly weekday morning, my ears still red and burning from the run at my local nature preserve. I ran out the door forgetting my hat, but felt I had to get back to write this letter, so I kept going. I’m rubbing my ears between sentences and wondering if I feel exhilarated or dumb. A little of both.

You and I are building a community here at Trails for Illinois of people who love, use, and want more trails and trail experiences. Cyclists, runners, hikers, bird watchers and skaters, cross-country skiers and walkers. A friend of mine is fond of a phrase, “all things in all ways,” and I think that’s a great way to describe our trail community. It’s also an attitude that can get you out of a rut: my passion is cycling, but I have fallen in love with running my little neighborhood nature trail. I highly recommend that you find a new way to visit your favorite trail this winter, or a trail that you’ve overlooked or dismissed. Why limit the good in life?

At our core at Trails for Illinois, we know this to be true: Illinoisans enjoy the highest quality of life when they can regularly get outside, moving under their own power. This is the best and highest use of the corridors and pathways we will advocate for, improve, and promote. Good health and well-being is the foundation for all of life’s endeavors, and allows us to keep our footing during job crisis, family crisis, financial crisis. When you can say, “At least I have my health,” you’re proclaiming your ability to adapt and bounce back.

Personally, I believe that in our lifetimes, towns and agencies will be as obligated to connect walking and biking facilities to their residents as they are now to connect sewer and clean water. The rising stream of research by our top institutions is emphatically demonstrating that our physiology craves the outdoors, that our mental abilities and emotional balance suffer in fundamental, measurable ways when we stay in and stay still too much. I believe this stream is going to become a flood. Trails for Illinois has a cornerstone role in the public health initiative of our time!

2012 is our year, fellow trail lover. It’s the year we begin to connect Illinoisans to the benefits of integrating outdoor trails and multi-use paths into their lives, their businesses, and their communities. Here’s how:

• Gitter done! We’ll help communities and agencies around the state find the grants, the design know-how and the political will to complete well-designed trails with great connections.
• Team up! We’ll make friends to fight for good trail policy. Illinois is struggling to fund its trail programs, and in Washington, 2012 brings the final battle for trail funding in the next federal transportation bill. We’re already finding allies in trail user groups, cycling advocates, and parks & recreation to bring home trail funding, crucial investments in the well-being of Illinoisans.
• Make it count—literally! With volunteers and electronic counters, we’ll measure use and collect user data along the state’s major trail systems. We’ll be able to put to paper the economic impact and the health impact trails have on Illinois’ communities—a sorely needed tool at a time when every public dollar spent must prove its worth!
• Shout about it! Illinois trail builders and trail user groups need a mechanism to broadcast, celebrate, and share stories. Our website, trailsforillinois.org, will re-launch in January with trail database integration, and our social networks already hum with trail and trail-related feeds. Our newsletter, Trail News, becomes a bi-monthly in January with both print and electronic editions.
• Saddle up! In July 2012, we’ll host our first fundraising event, a 2-day, overnight, car-free bicycle ride on Illinois trails called GITy up! (GIT = Grand Illinois Trail). Illinois already boasts a trail network that in many places can go toe-to-toe with Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Michigan….  We’ll give doubters, beginners and families a small, compelling taste of the trail adventures our state offers, and raise Illinois‘ profile as a trail adventurer’s destination.

Trails for Illinois is still such a little organization to have so big an agenda for the next year. But I admit it energizes me—suddenly we are looking beyond surviving as an organization. We want to THRIVE. Our time in this particular state is a desperate time that asks of EVERY person and organization involved in good works to strike out boldly toward their vision.

I hope you are energized by the challenge, too. Trails for Illinois wants to make every home, and doorstep, and driveway a trailhead. Step boldly forward with us. Make a substantial year-end contribution today toward our work in 2012 (on-line or print this PDF).

And then waste not another minute of this beautiful day and get outside.

Steve Buchtel, Executive Director
steve@trailsforillinois.org
708-365-9365

Last Friday, still dripping from a wave of support from Illinois and the rest of America to preserve trail funding, the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee released its draft transportation reauthorization bill that shrinks trails funding for the next two years by more than $80 million, from $1.15 billion to $833 million. And those funds are no longer set aside by mandate for pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure. They can be raided by the state for more roads.

This moment, right now, is why Trails for Illinois matters to your life, your community. Two reasons:

1. Less obligation for Illinois to spend federal funding on trails means more depends on relentless & statewide trails advocacy. If the Senate language survives markup—and our DC friends say it will, as Senators Boxer and Inhoefe have prevented amendments—it will set the tone for the transportation debate in the U.S. House. And if Illinois gets the flexibility to let itself off the hook from creating safe, convenient, and sustainable pathways for enjoyment and transportation, then our relationship building and advocacy in Springfield and in Illinois lawmakers’ home districts—already a critical and core activity—will directly impact whether dollars are spent on trails—or not.

2. Statewide trails advocacy is key to the federal transportation fight. Senator Boxer’s bill backtracks on promises she made to trail advocates this past summer, and it’s lowered our expectations for the Senate’s version of the transportation bill. But passage in the Senate remains, and the House gets a say; one of the things they’re saying is lawmakers want a 6-year transportation bill, not a 2-year as the Senate is likely to propose. There are a lot of wins left on the table for trails, and capturing them requires the diligence, connections and quick feet that only a statewide trails advocacy organization can provide.

We’ve been waiting for the larger battle for federal trails funding to begin, and, with Boxer’s stunning draft, suddenly find ourselves in it. While you consider your end-of-year giving, please consider that the fight for continued federal investment in trails for Illinois has suddenly begun. Trails for Illinois needs your year-end gift to fund the work ahead.

Please use our simple and safe donation page hosted by Razoo.com to pledge your support for Trails for Illinois. We’re working with our Washington, DC partners to craft a strategy in response to Boxer’s draft, and that will help shape our strategy here in Illinois. Within a week, we should have a plan of action for your involvement. Stay tuned, and thank you for reading! And remember to give!

Since this summer, Trails for Illinois has been helping Friends of the Cal-Sag Trail develop a Legacy Campaign to raise $3 million in private construction funding by 2013 for the Cal-Sag Trail. The dollars will provide the match for $12 million in federal trail building grants. The Friends are releasing sneak peeks of the campaign video every two days in the run-up toward their campaign launch event, Bridges & Blues, on November 5.

Before working on Trails for Illinois, I (Steve here) was working with the Friends of the Cal-Sag Trail advocating, raising money and giving technical assistance to build the 32-mile multi-use path across the Chicago south suburbs. There are 10 public agencies involved and dramatic cultural and economic differences between communities. Despite these inherent challenges to trail building, the Cal-Sag Trail has gone from initial efforts in 2005 to a Spring 2013 construction letting.

The Cal-Sag Trail’s success taught me about the widespread appeal that trails hold for Illinoisans, about the Triple Bottom Line as a selling point as well as an essential trail principal, and the power of cooperative partnerships. The Cal-Sag Trail experience shaped much of my motivation for wanting to help Trails for Illinois.

I bring the Cal-Sag Trail with me as a major project for Trails for Illinois; including the regional trail projects our board is involved with—the Pennsy Greenway, the Kickapoo Trail, the Mississippi River Trail, the Rock Island Trail—we have an impressive slate of destination trails that I feel will have measurable, substantial benefits for Illinoisans’ quality of life. It’s a list that will grow. Advocating, promoting and fundraising for trails that meet a Triple Bottom LIne - providing benefits to 1) health, 2) the local economy, and 3) the environment - will be a priority at Trails for Illinois.

As understanding grows about outdoor physical activity’s importance to quality of life in Illinois, interest in the Triple Bottom Line grows around the health benefits of safe trails and greenways. In the Cal-Sag Trail’s legacy campaign, we’ve emphasized the connections between outdoor activity physical and mental health, particularly during child development. Public and private health & wellness interests in Illinois have yet to step up to involve themselves in trail and greenway development as they have in Indiana and Arkansas. We (the board and I) think health & wellness involvement is possible, important, and necessary across the state to maximize trail benefits for all of us.

Enjoy the video teaser, and check in at http://youtube.com/calsagtrail on Friday and Monday morning for additional installments. Want to see the whole video? You’ll need a ticket to Bridges & Blues. See you November 5!

Our first newsletter as Trails for Illinois—and thanks to Senator Coburn (R-OK) we can help you save federal trails funding!

But it’s not all urgent action to save millions of dollars for Illinois Trails—you can take our new supporters’ survey, read about the two guys helping us develop a renewed & refreshed statewide trails community, and…you can help launch it.

For a transitional newsletter, that’s a lot!

In 1979, your first grader—ha, probably you! Or heck, your parent could have been 6 years old in ‘79—was outside. A lot. By him/her self.

The link above is a nice piece that Amy C., mom of two from Tinley Park, pointed out to me. It’s a checklist for determining if your 6 year old is ready for first grade. “Can he travel alone in the neighborhood (four to eight blocks) to store, school, playground, or to a friend’s home?”

In 2011, that’s a test for a parent more than a kid.

Lenore Skenazy describes that Carter-era 6-year old—and any precociously perambulating child since— as a free range kid. “Children, like chicken, deserve a life outside the cage.” What a vision.

I read Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louve this summer, and Richard’s call is similar to Lenore’s—for the first 2.7 million years of our species until likely just after your own childhood, kids said “See ya, Mom!” (maybe they barked or chirped this early on) and then bolted for the lower tree limbs/cave entrance/door.

And parents expected them to get wherever they were going, and to find their way back. Both authors feel this is a cornerstone of healthy development and a high quality of life.

Trails for Illinois does too. We’ve said it before: we believe that every Illinoisan is wired to appreciate and benefit—physically, emotionally, mentally—from using trails. We’re extending the range and freedom that the child and the parent can experience; in some communities, the trails we advocate for, promote and develop will be the only opportunity the kid and the adult has to engage that elemental desire for mobility, exploration and independence.

Is a trail helping you raise a free range kid?

What’s your favorite trail in the late summer/early fall?

Illinois has world-class trails!

Trails for Illinois believes that sharing this with the world—heck, with our own state!—goes hand-in-hand with advocating for more of them. Congratulations to the Forest Preserve District of Cook County!

Here’s your at-your-desk trail break  - Great Western Trail Mile 01 (by STAKProd). Having a daily trail break post suddenly seems like a great idea for trailsforillinois.org.

The Trust for America’s Health released its study of state’s obesity rates in July. They’re alarming. Of particular concern, look at Illinois childhood obesity rates—over 20%. Delve deeper, and the rates spike upward for minorities and the poor. 

Good health is an effective buffer between your well-being and stressful events, which—in this economy, with this nation’s politics—are numerous. Active living infrastructure like trails becomes an essential safety net, offering healthful outdoor activity to all users for free. Being able to exclaim “At least I have my health” provides perspective and can even restore the optimism required to feel like we’re back on track.

Trails for Illinois believes every Illinoisan deserves opportunities for healthy, active, and safe outdoor experiences. In fact, good health requires it. While we can’t do much about congressional rancor or unemployment, we can say “At least we can connect people to trails.” And wonderfully, lots of times that’s enough.