Anchorage has 8 new Certified League Cycling Instructors, yay!

While they all have different backgrounds, they all have in common being active members of the cycling community, we invite you to know a little bit more about each one of them. 

Brigit Reynolds

Brigit works at the Refugee Assistance and Immigration Services (RAIS) from the Catholic Social Services in Anchorage. She became an all-year commuter in Anchorage after moving here and not owning a car, she is a tough avid commuter that you can find on the trails despite impeccable weather. 

Chelsea Ward-Weller

Chelsea became an LCI to help others enjoy the fun of biking and teach them how to be safe while doing it. She works for the Municipality of Anchorage, has been on the Bike Anchorage board for a few years, and is passionate about improving traffic safety and active transportation in Anchorage. Chelsea started bike commuting when she was in the first grade, and continues to commute by bike all year. She supplements bike commuting with mountain and fat biking with her two dogs.

Christi Meyn

Christi is a civil engineer with CRW Engineering. Biking is a way for her to get to work, run errands, exercise, and stay involved in the community, and she's been biking since she was a kid. Christi is drawn to biking as a form of transportation that's healthier, more equitable, and more fun than a car. She is happy to help Anchorage's bike commuters learn best practices to stay safe.

Christina Grande

Christina started to ride a bike as a little kid, doing laps up and down the street. Then, there was a big gap n her life without riding a bike until College, her uncle was a bike messenger in San Francisco and a big influence on her to consider the bicycle as a serious mode of transportation. She started riding her bike to school because parking was rough and expensive. After college, she moved to Alaska for a job. 

Devora Barrera

Devora became an urban cyclist when she was in law school at the age of 21, it happened because gas and parking were too expensive and public transportation was unsafe, unreliable and a terrible experience overall. She has been involved in transportation and urban planning ever since. 

She has experience teaching Transportation subjects, it started while she was working in the municipality of her city in Mexico and she was part of the team that created the curriculum that would be taught to drivers that incurred misdemeanors or got tickets for endangering non-motorized users, the curriculum would teach drivers how to safely interact with cyclists, pedestrians, and people with disabilities and how to respect their infrastructure. She later was with Cycles of Change in Oakland, California teaching kids from the Fruitvale Elementary School how to be urban cyclists taking them for rides in the city, and teaching bike mechanics both in English and Spanish. Dev would love to teach Smart Cycling Classes in schools of the Anchorage School District in the future, and to adults who want to be bicycle commuters. 

Donovan Camp

Donovan was born and raised in Fairbanks and first started using the bike as primary transportation during his senior year at UAF because one day in the middle of winter his truck stopped working. After learning to commute at -20F, everything else seemed like a breeze and he's been enjoying the many benefits of the bike as transportation ever since. 

In 2015, Donovan graduated and moved to Anchorage to start working in the transportation engineering sector. He has become passionate about applying his knowledge and time to help mature and modernize the urban design policies in the city he loves and calls home. 

Kaitlin Mattos

Mat

Mat first got into bicycling as a pre-teen and teenager, as a mode of transportation in the suburbs, then in college, they built a bike from scratch and started going on day rides. After college, they wanted to go on a bike trip but didn't have a cycling community and didn't know how to do it --so, Mat bungee'd a milk crate to their newly-built bike, threw a backpacking bag in, and rode with a friend, from NJ to Nashville over the course of a month, after this, she rode solo from San Diego to Montreal.

Most recently Mat bicycled to their homeland starting in the high Himalayas of India and down to Kerala at the tip of India, where her parents are from. After that long bike ride, they became committed to sharing her passion for bike trips as a way to see incredible places, taste delicious food, feel the generosity of strangers, and also as a way to uncover homeland, seek truths within oneself, and access personal power.

Mat co-wrote a chapbook called Asking for Elephants, and after went on a storytelling tour across the US. They are currently working on a book about that India ride, queerness, sobriety, and homeland. Mat is excited about the possibility of learning how to actually teach and instruct cycling so that they can offer tangible skills alongside storytelling.

You can see the list of all the Certified League Cycling Instructors in Anchorage and their contact information here.