Good morning, everyone. Hello, my name is Joseph Floyd. I am the executive director for the Active Streets Alliance here in Gainesville, Florida. This morning, I want to chat with you all about collisions in play. So what’s the first thing you think of when you hear something like collisions in play? Some people may think about bumper cars, or perhaps sports-like football. Today, we’re not going to talk about those things, but I would wonder what is going through your mind right now. Is it likely something that happened in childhood? And if so, why? One possible explanation might be that when we play as adults, sometimes certain authority figures want to know what’s going on. And so we have to find meaningful ways to play and interact with one another. And I’ll give you the reasons why throughout this presentation. We’ll also be coming back to this slide for a very important reason. First, let me tell you how we got to where we are as an organization. In 2013, I had the great pleasure and honor of working with Raymond Rawls Design, Alachua County’s Office of Sustainability, and a host of other people to build something we call, affectionately, the bike gator. It’s 23-foot-long, 95% reuse, and chomps like any good gator should. It also taught me a lot. It taught me that 100 community members can come together who know nothing about each other and have no reason to do so. At an after party for the bike gator in November of 2013, it all began to set in. We noticed how many people we were able to befriend. We noticed how many people in the community wanted more. We began to see as we thought through it what the potential of this event was, what the potential was to build community. I dreamed large. I thought of bringing flat land through the homecoming parade on a single eight-by-bicycle trailer stage with flamethrowers. Okay, maybe not the last part. But you understand the potential, right? It seemed limitless, except for one problem. Homecoming only occurs once per year. So another novel opportunity happened, and in October of 2014, we hosted our first Open Streets Road Closure as a pilot that’s now known as Active Streets and has its own brand and identity. Those events have grown dramatically to see almost 10,000 people, 100 organizations stretched across one mile of what we call Gainesville’s most iconic roadway, University Avenue. We also use images like the one on the screen to elicit thoughts of community, interaction, and activity. But there was still something missing. It was how do we get those interactions that we saw when restaurants put tables on the street corner, out on the roadway, people who had never met, set side by side and had conversations over meals? How do we continue that in a daily or more routine basis? How do we develop those conversations? So in come a bike boat, because if a bike and a boat had a love child, it would be a bike boat. We realized that not everyone had the skills that some of my artist friends have, and we realized that to grow the movement and get back to what we started as, what I saw as such a beautiful thing, we had to find a way to let people have a meaningful inclusion and incorporate it into their other conversations. So me with a half bad idea said, I like boats, I like bikes, how do I stick the two together? And it’s building a team. It’s like everything else that we’ve done thus far. We put together a group, somebody had a boat, somebody knew how to get the bike, somebody actually knew how to make it work, and none of us had ever worked on a project together. So what does that get us to? It gets us to more creatures, more boats, more bikes, more fun. So this is from the homecoming parade this year, but it’s not the end, it’s only the beginning. This was the lead up for what is going to happen tomorrow, an event called the Menagerie in Motion Kinetic Derby, where 19 vessels was people as young as five and people as old as, well, I promised I wouldn’t tell you. Well, all compete, but they won’t compete in the way that you think. They’ve put together teams because no one can be a single rider. You have to have at least two entrants so that there’s a building of community throughout the event. And the competition is all meant for us to be young kids once more. We will have an opportunity to have fun awards like most audacious breakdown, second most mediocre, because it was pointed out that you cannot call out the worst. Which leads to a very important question. What does that mean second runner up is? So with awards like that and best costume and pageantry, we enlisted the help of friends. So we have the mayor of Gainesville as one of the judges. We have two city commissioners who built their own entries. We have the mayor of city of Hawthorne, who’s also going to be entering with four of his friends, people from high springs, and it’s become truly a community event. The goal is to reach out through the community and also find ways to incorporate these same fun events with kids in our school system. Steam education for us, cycling advocacy, teaching kids how to use the road properly and how to interact with one another. Because at the end of the day, I can assure you that when I sat next to someone and held something while they saw three inches from my finger, I had to extend a lot of trust. So with that in mind, here’s what you didn’t see in that first slide. Behind that rather large officer friend of ours is me. They weren’t talking to each other. He wasn’t getting ready to write a ticket. They were actually trying to figure out how to work the bike boat. So my friend Kevin wanted to test it out. The officer saw us, turns out officers are people too. And though we couldn’t convince him to ride the boat himself, he did laugh for three minutes as he watched us try and do donuts in a parking lot, just in case anyone wonders. But so here’s what happened. We built community around an event and then around another event. And what we did was we created a sandbox, a place for people to play safely as adults so that we can go back to our youthful innocence so that we can look back at a time when there was no boys or girls, there was no black or white, there was no anything but equality. The only thing that you wanted, the only thing that you needed was an opportunity to find someone else and share your time and your thoughts with. But I hope that you all will not just take my word for this. Here’s an interview from 2011 from somebody we all know, love and have been taught to trust. Hello, you could solve the world’s problem right now. Okay, so in Washington, everybody hates each other. Nobody will do anything together. And it’s hurting America. How do you fix it, Alon? Play dates. Play dates. Yeah, everybody has play dates. Like a, put a Democrat in a Republican play date. Harry Reid, John Boehner play date. Play date. And everybody brings their own food. Okay, yeah. John Boehner’s kind of your color. And you have to share and you have to sing songs. I think that might solve it. I don’t know. I don’t think we’ve tried so far, Alon. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. So with that, I will leave you asking that you build vehicles for change. That you join me in this playful revolution. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.