Movies, discussion, and free popcorn! Explore how people (and bikes) are creating powerful change.

Elly Blue and Joe Biel will co-present a new interactive discussion and presentation including eight short films about Groundswell movements, incidences where people demand better neighborhood conditions and successfully implement them.

Stories include how Reading, Pennsylvania came to be 13th on the East Coast for bike commuting without any advocacy or government spending, former gang members riding bikes to raise awareness about violence, Mexico City’s superhero of the streets, a luchador called Peatonito, the story of the League of American Bicyclists’ equity council, how the City of Portland’s Sunday Parkways worked as a response to gentrification, and how cyclists are representing themselves and creating their own voices all over the world.

Elly Blue is a writer and bicycle activist living in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Grist, Bicycling Magazine online, Bitch Magazine, BikePortland, The Magazine, and Momentum, among other publications. She has been featured on Democracy Now!, in the Oregonian, and on Oregon Public Broadcasting. She tours annually with the Dinner and Bikes program that she co-founded, and is co-producer and director of Groundswell, a series of movies about people using bicycling to make their communities better. Since January 2015, she is co-owner and marketing director at Microcosm.

Joe Biel is a self-made publisher and filmmaker who draws origins, inspiration, and methods from punk rock. He is the founder/manager of Microcosm Publishing and co-founder of the Portland Zine Symposium. He tours with his films on the Dinner and Bikes program and has been featured in Time Magazine, Publisher’s Weekly, Utne Reader, Portland Mercury, Oregonian, Broken Pencil, Readymade, Punk Planet, Profane Existence, Spectator (Japan), G33K (Korea), and Maximum Rocknroll. He is the author of Good Trouble: Building a Successful Life & Business on the Spectrum, Manspressions: Decoding Men's Behavior, Make a Zine, The CIA Makes Science Fiction Unexciting, Beyond the Music, Bamboozled, Bipedal, By Pedal, and more. He is the director of the documentaries Aftermass: Bicycling in a Post-Critical Mass Portland, If It Ain't Cheap, It Ain't Punk, Of Dice & Men, $100 & A T-Shirt, and the Groundswell film series. The Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy described Biel as "not trained in pedagogy." His work can be found at joebiel.net