Stepping Up continued from page 5 some of their formative years hanging out and bonding with gang leaders from the Denver Bloods and Crips, as well as homeless LGBTQ youth who’d been shunned by their families. “Here’s Tracy and Jonathon on every other weekend, hanging out with guys who are defi - nitely some of the most challenged young peo- ple in Denver at the time,” recalls Dave Stalls. Adds Jonathon: “I always had this really unique urban-community kind of raw con- nection to the work that he did.” Urban Peak, a Denver organization fo- cused on serving homeless youth, took over the Spot in 2003 and has run it ever since. Dave Stalls continued working in nonprofi ts, serving as president and CEO of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Colorado; he also co-founded Street Fraternity, a center located on East ment at the African Community Center, where he worked with people who’d fl ed war and famine in countries like Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea. Through this refugee resettlement work, he saw fi rsthand what it was like for some people to have to navigate in a totally new country without a car. “I was literally just co-experiencing the harm, witnessing so many elders holding grocery bags in the rain without a shelter, getting sprayed right across the street from an apartment where they live,” Stalls remembers. While in the job, he felt an urge to take a long journey to discover the country and fi nd himself. “The original ache to do that was very personal,” he says. “I needed to recalibrate a lot of things.” Stalls began planning for his trip by talk- ing with other individuals who had walked across the United States. He studied the Kanoa from a cold, pouring rain. Stalls broke bread with an Ohio family on Easter Sunday. The worst part of the trip was walking through Kansas City, says Stalls. “It was the heart of the humid, sticky, unforgiving summer,” with “fl ies, bugs, wetness,” he remembers. Kanoa, who is part husky, also struggled in the heat. Both physically and mentally exhausted, Stalls thought about quitting. But he pressed on, realizing that he was also experiencing signifi cant mental health benefi ts from walk- ing, which he calls his own “medicine.” And he wanted others to experience that, too. Stalls began posting online to see if people would like to walk with him for a day. A few people showed up initially, and then the groups began to grow. And he met more folks who wanted to help him. An artist in Moab, Utah, housed him for a night, as did a woman who worked at an with residents who wanted to talk about infrastructure and design. Stalls and others involved with Walk2Con- nect eventually transitioned it from an LLC to a worker-owned cooperative. Through his work with the organization, he says he kept seeing the “raw, dehumanizing reality of that lived experience in all weather, every day, for people who get around by walking.” Walk2Connect ultimately shut down during the pandemic, though Stalls says that the organization’s website is still maintained and that cities can continue to hire people associated with its network for walking leadership training. But he’d already moved on, answering a call that “just kept getting louder and louder,” he says. “I would host so many events with state transportation, city transportation offi cials. I would hear an uncountable amount of times, Jonathon Stalls encourages walking tour participants to notice the smell of gasoline and the roar of cars; Phyllis Smack sometimes has to roll in the street. Colfax Avenue near the Denver and Aurora border that fosters growth in young men primarily from refugee backgrounds. Standing tall at 6’4”, Jonathon Stalls starred in basketball at Lakewood High School and received a verbal scholarship of- fer from the University of Northern Colorado, where his father had played on the football team decades earlier. But after he started prac- tice, the coach told Stalls and another player that they’d have to redshirt for their freshman year because the program was taking on two Australian community-college transfers. Stalls stuck it out at UNC for a year and then moved to Southern California, where he became a semi-professional beach volleyball player. He also studied art at a college in San Diego and got involved with a church group, trying to pray away the gay. He dated women but still felt attracted to men. In 2005, Stalls moved to Ireland as part 6 of his work with the church group. While he was fi nally able to come out openly as gay, he began to struggle with suicidal ideations, as he still felt uncomfortable being his true self in the world. At the end of 2006, Stalls moved back to California to give semi-pro beach volleyball another go before ultimately giving up on the sport and returning to Colorado to fi nish school at Metropolitan State University of Denver. After completing his undergraduate stud- ies in design and entrepreneurship at MSU Denver, Stalls took a job in refugee resettle- American Discovery Trail, a system of roads and trails that form a path across the country, and used it as both inspiration and a way to chart a route through a handful of major cities he wanted to stop in during his trek. “The only thing that was somewhat set in stone for me was the big cities I wanted to get to. If these cities are my anchor points, then I can get creative and get the advice from local people in between them,” Stalls recalls. Stalls raised money for the walk through an organization that provides loans to low- income entrepreneurs. With that partnership, he was able to get $10,000 to fund his journey. He set off in March 2010, starting at Cape Henlopen State Park in Delaware. From there, he walked to Washington, D.C., then on through Cincinnati, St. Louis, Kansas City, Pueblo, south of Salt Lake City and San Francisco. “That was eight and a half months of walking through fourteen states, cities, in suburban, rural, desert and mountain landscapes,” Stalls says. He went through a pair of hiking shoes every month. The journey offered a “whole new way of moving through the world,” allowing him “to listen and understand things from an unhurried walking perspective,” he says. For much of the walk, he was accompanied by his dog, Kanoa. Although he camped outdoors some nights, Stalls also stayed with 120 strangers. The fi rst to welcome him into her house lived in Maryland, and she sheltered Stalls and Old West saloon in Eureka, Nevada. Many of these connections happened spontaneously as people slowed their cars, rolled down a window and asked if Stalls needed anything. His favorite part of the trek was walking through the high desert of Nevada. “I had already walked through twelve states,” he recalls. “I was feeling so strong in my body. I was so open to what would show up in the desert. I wasn’t afraid of the desert. I thought I’d be terrifi ed. But I was like, ‘Bring it on.’” And he wasn’t just feeling freed up emotion- ally and spiritually. With no one in sight on Highway 50, Stalls took off his clothes and spent hours walking naked. “I would just have my pushcart without my clothes,” he says. “I had my shoes. I was just in these huge landscapes.” Finally, after 3,030 miles, his cross-coun- try walk ended at the Pacifi c Ocean. Stalls returned to Denver and began doing communications for the progressive faith- based advocacy organization Together Colo- rado, which works on issues like climate justice, immigration reform and criminal justice reform. In 2012, he founded Walk2Connect, a business that trained community members, public offi cials and nonprofi t leaders how to become walking leaders. Walk2Connect soon had a contract with Boulder and took city planners out on walks to show them how to lead their own treks around town ‘I’ve never done this before, this is shocking, this is eye-opening. I’ve been working in these systems for twenty years.’ Unless you absolutely have to, why in the hell would you walk on it?” Stalls asks. So he came up with a project that focused on people who use their feet, wheelchairs or public transit to get around. “I just really wanted to name this specifi c lens of pedestrian mobility,” says Stalls. He called it Pedestrian Dignity. He began hosting Pedestrian Dignity events, inviting both regular citizens and government offi cials on walking tours to show them the lack of dignity afforded to pedestrians. But while the demonstrations worked in person, Stalls had a tough time sharing them. “I started on Instagram, and I would just take videos via my phone. And I would try to use YouTube, but I was never great at creating longer-form YouTubes,” he admits. In fall 2019, Stalls was hosting a Pedes- trian Dignity event in west Denver when a young teenager he describes as “very artistic and amazing” told him that he needed to get on TikTok. Stalls initially balked at the idea. But as he was heading home on the bus, he realized that he had been “asked by a young person to engage,” and that he should take the teen up on the offer. So he created a TikTok account. He soon realized that it was the perfect me- dium, allowing him to continued on page 8 SEPTEMBER 22-28, 2022 WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | westword.com CONOR MCCORMICK-CAVANAGH
