At any Little Bellas program throughout the country, Martha Flynn is there. Not physically, but ethereally in actions that came directly from an idea she had while out on a ride. That she's thinking about Little Bellas in her free time proves how viscerally she believes in getting more girls on bikes — especially in her home state of Minnesota and all across the upper Midwest.
Martha is responsible for "Meet and Greet," an event held a week prior to each program where leads and mentors get together to bond before the program starts. She's helped launch six Little Bellas programs in the Twin Cities area, and she is the founder/creator of the wildly successful "Bellabration," which concluded its winning streak in November 2025.
Martha is — in a word — tectonic. With a Midwesterner's signature sense of humility, she doesn't volunteer her quantifiable achievements with Little Bellas. We had to ask. Here we learn what Martha did before mountain biking; what's her superpower; and the one thing she learned that will make you a powerful event organizer.
*Due to external conditions, audio in the video may be hard to follow, which is why we've included the complete transcript below.
Interview with Martha Flynn — Full video transcript
How did you get involved with Little Bellas?
00:00:10 Martha
I have been involved with Little Bellas for 10 years now.
I first heard about Little Bellas when I was volunteering with our high school mountain bike league, and one of the core staff members worked for Specialized.
There was this Little Bellas program, which was pretty small at the time. And I was working with our cycling league trying to get more girls participating in racing. And he said, you have to get a program here. So, he introduced me. Actually, we got on a call and he introduced me to Sabra and Lea.
00:00:53 Wendy
Ten years with Little Bellas. What have you been doing with Little Bellas up until now?
00:00:58 Martha
My job with Little Bellas seems to always change, which I love because we're a small organization. We were super small when I started 10 years ago, and we've been growing ever since. My involvement with the organization has slowly changed over the years; I started that first year just being a program lead, running the first program in Minnesota in Woodbury. And then I slowly just took on more and more tasks that were needed.
The first thing that I did to help was to get involved with helping prospective program leads — people who wanted to start chapters in their area. I helped them work through the application process and let them know how much work it takes to start a program — helped them understand our application process. And that was pretty fun.
From there, once we grew even bigger and needed regional coordinators who helped support those program leads throughout the country, I was with the first wave of regional supports. Then as we kept getting bigger and bigger, I kind of helped — I have a project management background from my other job that I had — I worked a lot to help with processes and things like that, and even using a software tool for project management tasks so that we stay on top of everything.
00:02:34 Wendy
If you had to quantify your involvement with Little Bellas… What do the signs say?
00:02:44 Martha
What do your signs say?
00:03:03 Martha
What everyone should know is that Little Bellas has supporters everywhere, and not just women who support Little Bellas.
00:03:15 Wendy
Every program has a Little Bellas fella, like James.
00:03:19 Martha
Exactly.
00:03:21 Wendy
Nice. So, if you had to quantify your involvement with Little Bellas since you started, how many programs have you helped launch?
00:03:33 Martha
I have been on the ground helping launch pretty much every program in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. I've been there visiting and helping that new program lead get set up. There are maybe one or two that I wasn't directly involved with on the day of the launch. But that's like more than 10 programs that I have been there for that first training for the mentors and that first day getting all the girls on bikes.
00:04:06 Wendy
You've been instrumental in the Twin Cities area, bringing the programs there. And now it's booming. How many programs are there in Minneapolis and St. Paul?
00:04:16 Martha
We have six programs right directly in the Twin Cities and then two in Cuyuna, which is only two hours north of us. And I think that's pretty unique to have such a large number in a metro area.
00:04:33 Wendy
Yeah. Six programs.
00:04:36 Martha
And I love it because, we started in Woodbury, and then it was two years later that we started our next chapter in Minnesota in Lakeville. And when that program started, Valerie (Dosland) was the lead. Valerie was a mentor in Woodbury, and then she became the lead in Lakeville. And so when she started that program, half of her new mentors had experience at Woodbury. We call that a sister chapter.
It made the launch of that program so much more successful because everyone wasn't brand new; they already knew how it worked. And so that's kind of how the Twin Cities Ride program started. Like all these programs, you hear about it, and it just kind of blossomed from Woodbury.
00:05:23 Wendy
I need to ask you a question about those first programs. How did you recruit Little Bellas? How do people get to know the program? How do you get little girls to get interested in Little Bellas?
00:05:40 Martha
Yeah, it's super interesting because those first two, probably two years,
Most of the Little Bellas came from — I call them established mountain bike families — because a lot of the recruiting was happening — or the marketing was happening — through the high school cycling league. And so it was families that already mountain biked. And then, as the years went on and we had our big tent, the Bellas would just take over the park in Woodbury and Lakeville. And community members would just see all these girls on bikes.
As the years continued, we started to have more and more families where maybe the parents didn't even ride bikes and it was only the girls.
So it's been really fun to see how that has morphed. We get to help educate the parents about what mountain biking is like. And even in some programs, we had moms that would do their own ride during the Little Bellas program because they had two hours free.
So you get to grow the biking community even more from the girls that are participating.
00:06:51 Wendy
If you had to guess, how many girls do you think that's impacted overall?
00:06:58 Martha
In programs that I've been involved with, I would guess maybe like 750 up to 1000 girls.
00:07:09 Wendy
How did you get into mountain biking?
00:07:13 Martha
I started — I mean, I've been biking my whole life — you know, as transportation as a kid, but I started mountain biking as cross-training for another sport.
I used to be a dorky inline skate racer. I did marathon distance inline, kind of like speed skating, but on inline skates, and it was a very kind of more roadie type athletic activity — lots of strategy and pace lines and team tactics. We always just did mountain biking for cross-training just for something a little different.
But the way I like to look at what I bring to the community is I like to bring connection. I like to learn about everyone and then figure out like, oh, well, you know how to do this. Well, you could help this person over there and like, connect people together. I really like introducing people, connecting them.
00:08:14 Martha
And it's funny because that's when you look at some of the Little Bellas training, like what we're doing with the girls — especially post COVID — it was helping them make friends and make connections.
Asking those open-ended questions, “Oh, you like dragons? Well, I heard that, Missy over here really likes dragons too. You should talk to her about that.”
What I like to do in the biking community is just kind of figure out how we can all be friends and interact with each other.
00:08:48 Wendy
In your time — not only with Little Bellas — but mountain biking in Minnesota and the upper Midwest, can you walk us through some of the initiatives you've helped spark there?
00:09:00 Martha
There's been a few initiatives with Little Bellas that I'm pretty proud of.
One that I started is the “Meet and Greet” concept that we do with all programs now. The Meet and Greet is a training that we do with all of our programs.
What it is, it's an in-person training that we do a week before the program starts, so that all the mentors get together at the venue. A lot of it is training so that they're familiar with the venue. They know which trails to take the Bellas on, which ones are no-no’s for our groups. But more importantly, it's a time for them to get to know the other mentors that they're going to be working with through the program. And so that's why we call it “Meet and Greet.”
At the beginning, when I started, this wasn't something that we did at Little Bellas.
I asked Sabra my first year, I said, “You know, some of my mentors are pretty nervous, and I'm thinking about having them meet me at the trail so that we can practice the games and meet each other.”
“Is that okay?”
She said, “Yes, of course, you can invite your mentors to meet you at the trail.”
We did that the first year and it really helped reduce their anxiety because these mentors, they're anxious about the program too. They don't know how exactly it's going to play out. For us to be able to practice the games together, meet who's going to be in your group — it just really helped everyone feel much more confident on that first day.
After that first year, it became something that we rolled out to all of the Little Bellas programs. And to this day, we do Meet and Greets at all the programs before they start.
00:10:41 Wendy
They're really good ideas. How do you come up with them? Give us the scoop.
00:10:45 Martha
Most of my brilliant Little Bellas ideas happen when I'm on a bike ride. Because I love to go out and I love to just ride for hours and hours out in nature and I don't ride with headphones. I just have my brain that's like ticking through and so usually that's where I get most of my ideas. They don't all come to fruition. Sometimes they're just rolling around in my head. But the ones that, the ones that seem to stick, then I'll run them by and brainstorm with the team, and some of them we try to implement.
00:11:22 Wendy
One of your roles — one of your many roles with Little Bellas — is that regional management. With Little Bellas, we as an organization vet the venue, the leads. There's mentor training — there's a lot of work that goes into launching a program. A lot of it, some of it can be actually, some of it can be very hair-pulling, like searching venues, getting permits, contract negotiations, that kind of stuff. How do you keep your momentum up when you run into obstacles?
00:12:06 Martha
Yeah, all that behind-the-scenes work. When I used to interview prospective chapters or prospective leads, I would tell them like, we want a lead that's like involved in the community, can recruit mentors, you know, you run the program.
And we'll do all the “yuck work” is what I called it. We're gonna’ get insurance, we're gonna’ get your venue contracts signed. As a regional, you're doing a lot of that yuck work so that your program leads can focus on running a successful program.
Sometimes you can hit a brick wall or like get kind of stuck in doing the yuck work. I do have moments of that. There was a time when I was doing all of the venue contracts throughout the nation. And I would have to be just like, okay, I'm going to sit at my desk and I'm going to do venues for two hours. And then, you know, I'd have to reward myself with something else after doing that work for a certain number of hours.
But there still were times when you would hit a wall where they really wanted to charge us a really high rate or it wasn't going to work for this. When you completely hit a brick wall, that's when I need to just get up from my chair and just leave it, or work on something else and come back to that problem the next day.
Because sometimes it just works itself out.
Or sometimes, you can come at it from another angle, but it doesn't work to just, keep pounding at something that's not working.
00:13:57 Wendy
Yeah, banging your head against the wall.
00:14:00 Martha
Yeah, just let it go and come back to it.
00:14:02 Wendy
You made a remark one time. It was an interesting remark. You were working on an event, and I think it was a local event. What you said was something like, “If I need help, I realized I can just ask for it.”
If you recall that moment, can you tell us a little bit more about it or what inspired that remark?
00:14:26 Martha
Why is that so hard to do?
I mean, I think that's part of my personality is I want — I mean, I was a nurse at one point in my life and like, helping people. I want to do everything and make it easy for people.
And in a lot of my roles at Little Bellas, that's what I should be doing. You know, as a regional, I should be making it as easy as possible for the program lead to do their work. But when I was doing this event, this local event, I was trying to organize everything and do it all. It was a community event for our venue in St. Paul.
And I realized, there's two other organizations that do mountain biking here as well. I should just ask them if they want to be involved and help. It was like a light bulb — like, I don't have to do this. Little Bells doesn't have to do it. We can partner with all of these organizations that want to get people on bikes.
When I did that, it ended up that the event was just like elevated to such a higher level and it was super fun.
One of the little Bellas mentors actually also coached for another organization, so she was wearing two hats anyway. So, it made sense to bring all those organizations together. You're not really asking for that much.
You just have to offer the opportunity to the person and then they can choose whether this works for me or if it or it doesn't.
It's not judging. I'm not telling you to come and do this. I'm just offering you this opportunity to get more people on bikes and most people are going to step up.
00:16:23 Wendy
However, on the other side of that, you've been involved with Little Bellas — 750, 1000 —1000 girls you've had a direct impact on. What do you see holds girls back in mountain biking?
00:16:37 Martha
Girls and women.
I think it's really the fear of the unknown or the fear, like they don't know what they're getting into. They don't know what this trail looks like. They don't know how long the ride is gonna’ be, and so they're apprehensive and they're scared.
At Little Bellas, I think what we do a really good job with is making it safe and making it fun. And we make sure that it is framed that way. We don't frame any of our programming around, “We're going to learn these three skills today.”
They do learn these three skills, but like we don't start out by saying, “This is what we're going to do today.” We say we're going to go ride our bikes; we're going to go pick flowers; we're going to do something. We make it very kind of non-stressful.
But you still see during the programs, you'll see those times where the little eyes will get really big and they are afraid about a particular trail that they've heard about, or just when they see something that they are fearful of. That's where I really like that we, as mentors, have the autonomy to figure out what is needed in that group at that particular moment.
I'll give you an example.
There was one day that I was riding with a group in St. Paul, and there was a girl who came from a mountain bike family, had ridden at Battle Creek before, kind of knew the trails, and she wanted to go down this trail called the Luge, which is what it sounds like.
Super fun if you have ridden it, but because it has these berms, it's a downhill run with berms and rocks and stuff. Her friend, who did not have a lot of mountain bike experience, just got those big giant eyes and she was not sure if she wanted — you could tell she kind of wanted to go down it, but she was afraid and she didn't really know what she was getting into. We gave that group the choice because we always do “challenge-by-choice” at Little Bellas.
You could come with me down the Luge or you could go with this other mentor and stay up top in the field.
I could just see her trying to decide like she really wanted to ride with her friend, but she was scared of this trail. We really need to help them reduce their fears, and so what we did is we set our bikes down, and we walked down probably the first quarter of the trail to look at it.
“Okay, see how this berm is?”
“Where do you think you want your bike to go?”
“We're going to really slow down here.”
She was so afraid of it because she didn't see it. She didn't know what it was like. So when we were able to break it down, she made it down. She went very, very slowly, but she made it to the bottom. And then the next time, you know, she wanted to do it again.
Once you break down that that fear of the unknown, you know, they really will take off.
00:19:55 Wendy
What holds you back, if anything?
00:20:02 Martha
There are certain certainly things that hold me back.
I think for me, what holds me back is not wanting to bother people. I don't know if that's a Midwest thing, but you know, I want all these wonderful things to happen in cycling in my community. You know, I'm out there trying to do as much as possible, but I do still have trouble asking for help. I think I need to lean into those, like that event that you talked about, like the times that, hey, I can ask for help and people want to, and I have to remember that.
And also remember that like, what is the…”You don't catch, you don't make any goals, you don't try for…,” Wayne Gretzky said something like that.
But I really have to realize that, you know, I have to just ask people for help because they want to and I'm not really bothering them. And if I am bothering them or it doesn't work for them, they can tell me and that's fine.
00:21:08 Wendy
So tell us, what's next for you?
00:21:12 Martha
I'm not leaving Little Bellas, that's for sure.
I'm going to continuebrunning the two programs that I run at Battle Creek in St. Paul and continue to do the community events there because I'm really kind of zoning in on, you know, St. Paul is where I grew up and I'm super passionate about getting more bikers out there, especially kids from the community right around the trail. So I'm continuing that, but I am trying to slowly retire.
And I want to do a lot more traveling with my husband. We have a transit van that we throw our bikes in. I like to travel around the country and then just, spend more time just being quiet in nature, taking my dog for walks.
But yeah, still involved in Little Bellas, but just less of the regional role.