New Year New Name

This past summer, we committed to change the name of our organization by the end of 2020. We acknowledge that both “WTF” and “Bikexplorers” are harmful, with ‘explorer’ using traumatic colonial language and ‘WTF’ centralizing cisgender women while being a recognizable acronym for ‘what the f*ck.” 

Asking for Name Suggestions

On December 1st, our leadership team and past collaborators started to brainstorm on name ideas, but we recognized that we’d fall short if we didn’t include you all, our community, in the process. So we asked to hear from you on how our name can be a better representation of our adventurous, radical, and intersectional cycling community.

On December 16th, we asked for your ideas via a Google survey, and folx submitted a lot of creative names. Once we had everyone’s submissions, the leadership team chose a selection of names for the entire community to vote on via social media. Many thanks to those of you who shared your ideas! We especially liked ideas from Robyn Holmes and Ryan LaBarre! 

Voting for the Final Name

On January 5th, through Instagram and Facebook we asked our community to vote on their favorite name out of the 4 choices:

1. EveryBody’s Bike Adventure

2. Gathering EveryBody to Adventure Ride (GEAR) 

3. Radical Adventure Riders

4. Intersectional Bike Collective

Choosing Radical Adventure Riders

On January 15th, Radical Adventure Riders (RAR) was chosen as our new name! It was a close call between Intersectional Bike Collective with 274 votes and Radical Adventure Riders with 342 votes, but RAR ultimately won our hearts over. RAR matched our spirit of getting rad and going against the mainstream while also staying true to our focus on adventure cycling. 

We also acknowledge that folx shared that ‘radical’ might not represent them, and we hear you. With RAR, we want to challenge how ‘radical’ is interpreted and show that it can mean many different things based on your own experience. We also acknowledge that folx shared that ‘Intersectional Bike Collective’ felt more like an all-encompassing organizational name, and we hear you too. We thought that we still have work to do to be ‘intersectional.’ We also want to challenge the notion that you need a more ‘professional’ name to get sh*t done. 

Thank You

It took about one and a half months (and much more behind the scenes) to get to our new name. We hope that we set an example of what a community-driven and transparent process could look like with our name change.

Thank you all for being a part of this name change process, we’re stoked on the new name! 

With love and gratitude,

RAR