Tegin Teich | October 27, 2025 | 6 minute read

When attending conferences, summits, and other professional development forums, I value the opportunity to connect with people and use the space away from our daily routines to think creatively. In September, I had the opportunity to attend a forum unlike any I’ve participated in so far because its primary goal was to bring together cohorts to build relationships and coalitions that will fuel real progress towards change in metro areas.

The Shared Use Mobility Center (SUMC) hosted the New Shared Use Mobility Summit with the goal of building a more connected and cohesive network of colleagues in leadership roles across multiple sectors (public, private, and nonprofit) and levels of government in metro regions. The concept was to build Change Teams that would help advance their region’s mission. SUMC’s mission is “to replace car-centric transportation with people-focused shared mobility to fight climate change, promote equity, and strengthen community.”

With fellow Change Team members from the Boston region, I helped create a shared vision of the transportation future that we could collectively commit to working towards. In addition to naming this future, we spent time identifying some of the next steps together. Instead of an agenda filled with presentations and panels, the majority of our time was spent in intensive, facilitated work sessions. During breaks for meals, we enjoyed talks or panels with change leaders, including the Illinois secretary of transportation Gia Biagi.

SUMC used the Three Horizons Framework as a model for these workshops to help us identify desired outcomes and how to reach them. We identified a future to work toward—one that involves virtuous cycles of successful collaboration across jurisdictions with consistent long-term goals—and then considered activities and innovations that could work to transform our dominant systems to enable us to achieve that future.

In the process of exploring these pathways to change with my fellow summit attendees, a few takeaways embedded themselves in my thinking:

• Change is usually slow, with sometimes sudden advancements. We have to be ready, with coalitions built and ideas vetted, for when significant opportunities for more momentous shifts present themselves. If we miss those moments, the concept of achieving change moves from slow to improbable.
• Storytelling is an essential element of bringing about change. To support change, individuals need to be able to personalize and identify with the reasons for change. Change comes from enabling them to envision a different outcome than the status quo.
• In order to achieve change, you have to bring the people who disagree with you into the conversation. They need to be heard, and have concerns, where feasible, responded to and mitigated.
• Trust is imperfect but essential. It is ok, and perhaps the most productive, to have a relationship of trust of your motives with a drive to verify your assertations. Otherwise, you may suffer from too much agreement and “group think.”

As I process these takeaways in the context of our Boston region, I want to devote energy to building trust (with verification) and coalitions across governments and sectors. That happens over time, with demonstrated ability to work together on common goals while recognizing where and how we will disagree. When we do disagree, we have to do so with respect and consideration, based on the foundation of knowing each other as individuals who may have different thoughts, motivations, and opinions. Despite our differences, by building those relationships we can trust that we are all working towards a better future.

In addition, it struck me and my fellow Change Team members that we have a few significant advantages in the Boston region. We have an existing, robust, dense housing and transportation infrastructure and, generally speaking, have state, regional, and local goals that align relatively well. We also have more consolidated public transit oversight than many other regions.

With those strengths in mind, I look forward to some of the challenging but inspiring work ahead to continue to build relationships, patiently build the momentum to be ready for opportunities for larger pivots in political will, and celebrate every win we find along the way, whether small or large.