Promoting Sustainability

This week’s guest on the Bend Don’t Break podcast moved to Bend in 2006, eventually finding her way to bike racing and work at Bend’s destination management organization, Visit Bend. In this excerpt from the conversation (lightly edited for clarity) Source Publisher Aaron Switzer chats with Serena Bishop Gordon, sustainability director for Visit Bend.

Source Weekly: I’m going to jump into something that’s less serious, which is, you’re a big gravel grinder — and I will talk sustainability — but tell me a little bit about your passion for getting outdoors here.

SBG: I moved to Bend in 2006 because of the recreation. My husband and I were hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. I had no idea where we would land at the end of it and popped into Bend from Elk Lake. A friend of a friend showed us around, and we came back at the end — after we finished that thru-hike — and never left. And that love of the outdoors translated into a love of riding bikes.

SW: Were you biking? I mean, you were hiking the PCT, but were you biking prior to that?

SBG: Er, no. I didn’t ride bikes at all. In fact, I was a runner. Yeah, and it sounds really strange to say now because Bend has such a running culture, but in 2006, I was like, there’s no community here. Someone said to me, you should do cyclocross race, and I had no idea what cyclocross was, and one thing led to another and I started mountain biking.

And then we were riding on gravel before gravel was a thing, you know, just like our cyclocross bikes and road bikes, and now that gravel cycling and gravel racing is a thing I just — I love it.

SW: You’ve done pretty well. I mean, you’re winning a lot of gravel races now.

SBG: Yeah, it’s an interesting transition. Even as I get older and put more energy into things that are other than racing, I actually have found that it lends itself to a lot of success on the bike. Because yes, it’s just fun and there’s less stress and while it’s not as technical and you’re getting a little view pretty far out, you can, really get away.

You can do a lot of exploring, and one of my favorite things is just looking at a map and finding the three-digit roads that I’ve never been on and trying to figure out how to connect them.

SW: Yeah, that’s fun. Well, all that kind of lends itself and makes sense, that you’re the Visit Bend sustainability director – your passion for the outdoors obviously infuses your work life.

SBG: A sustainability director wears a lot of different hats. Visit Bend, we really look at sustainability as a balance between the economy, people and our community and then this place and the environment and how we balance all those things — sort of like a three-legged stool. If one of those legs is neglected, the stool will fall over and so it’s a constant recalibration of, where are we putting energy? How much are we putting into our community? How much are we putting into our environment and how much are we putting into driving the economic success of this place, right? So day-to-day right now, I’m pretty engaged with the Bend Sustainability Fund. This is the third year, so I’m really excited about that. And I manage our strategic partnership program, which is a way for us to identify organizations, both locally and nationally, that are tackling the big issues that affect Bend’s ability to be a place that people want to live and visit in the long term. And then, I’m super lucky to have a team at Visit Bend that fully embraces the idea of reducing our usage of energy and resources, of investing in our outdoor recreation and providing awesome experiences not only to humans, but also keeping those experiences for the wildlife.

SW: Tell me more about the Bend Sustainability Fund. You’re in your third year, you got 30 applications. How much money are you going to be allocating?

SBG: About $900,000. The Bend Sustainability fund is something that — with the help of Kevney Dugan, our executive director, the City Council changed some code regarding the use of Transient Room Tax, which is short-term lodging tax that you pay if you stay in a hotel, to allow for Visit Bend to spend that money on tourism-related facilities. So when you think about the traditional definition of a tourism facility you’re thinking about a concert venue or the whitewater park. And when we look at what tourism-related facilities are in Bend, they can be a museum, they can be theater, but it can also be a trail and it can be river access and it can be all these other things that drive visitorship. But also, we’re investing in community resources. And so, when we look at the visitors and the residents, as partners we can say, the Bend Sustainability Fund is benefiting both, right? And we’re spending dollars generated through tourism, and investing those dollars into our local community to make everybody’s experience better. Everyone wins. We have funded projects through COTA— Central Oregon Trail Alliance — Meissner, Discover Your Forest, Bend BMX. Big Sky Bike Park that just opened, right? We played a role in that.

—Listen to the rest of the conversation by visiting the podcasts tab of bendsource.com.

This article appears in Source Weekly October 5, 2023.