Our History

In April 2017, Dave dictated some reflections on P4P for one of our new volunteers. It was transcribed by his software, as he describes here:

I don’t really type anymore. I type only my Spanish correspondence because my speech-recognition software, Dragon Dictate, is not yet available in Spanish. So if a funny word or two seems out of joint just read it out loud and it will probably make sense.

Besides this transcription, we have two audio files of interviews where Dave covers some of the same material:

An Oral History of P4P, and some Thoughts on International Development

By David Schweidenback

In the late 70s I was a Peace Corps Volunteer working at the end of the road going out into the Amazon basin in the country of Ecuador. Everybody walked everywhere they went except for my landlord Cesar Peña. Cesar had the only bicycle within 500 miles. He was much more successful than all of his counterparts because he had mankind’s greatest invention, the wheel, introduced into his life.

A couple of decades later I was living in New Jersey working as a carpenter. I put additions on all the houses in my neighborhood but ran out of houses to enlarge. I did most of the work carrying my tools in a wheelbarrow around the neighborhood. I needed to expand my potential clientele so I bought a truck and it made me really think back to my former landlord.

Every week in the late 80s and early 90s I used to see bicycles being thrown away because people didn’t want them anymore. I decided that if I could collect a dozen of them and ship them back to Sucua, in the Morona–Santiago Province of Ecuador, I could revolutionize the lives of some of the people in town. My goal was to collect and ship twelve bicycles.

Things have certainly got out of hand. We have now shipped more than 150,000 bicycles.

When I first started I had no intention of anything of what came afterwards, I was trying to do a simple good deed.

Things really started getting complicated because I couldn’t open a bank account without incorporating and I didn’t want to use my personal or business account for dealing with the bicycles, so we incorporated.

Soon after incorporating I realized we really needed to be a 501(c)(3) Corporation, a nonprofit corporation eligible for federal and state tax exemptions. New Jersey has lots of rules and as I followed these rules the organization got bigger and bigger.

I was playing around with the concept of Pedals for Progress for about a year and a half when I realized the enormous number of bikes which were actually available and the possibility of helping people around the world while simultaneously saving landfills from tons of good bikes being thrown away for no reason.

At the beginning of our third spring I was at a job site with a circular saw in one hand, and a piece of wood in the other hand, but I was not concentrating on cutting the board but rather thinking about bicycles and the work that Pedals for Progress could do. I stopped daydreaming just in time to see the spinning blade of the saw less than an inch away from the fingers of my left hand. I packed up my tools, left the job site, and have never worked as a carpenter again. I just couldn’t concentrate on the carpentry and I was so enthralled with the idea of lifting thousands of people out of poverty.

I went home and told my wife how close I had come to cutting my fingers off. I told her that I wanted to close my construction company and devote myself full-time to Pedals for Progress. Her response literally was, “You know you have two children to support!” She agreed to give me one year to try to make Pedals for Progress big enough so that I would be able to fulfill this dream and feed my children. That was 26 years ago.

At the end of that first year, 1993, the Board of Trustees gave me a whopping $5000 bonus for the year, and agreed to pay me a salary of $1000 per month, which after taxes was about $700, which was exactly the cost of my and my children’s medical insurance. At the end of 1993 the Board of Trustees raised my salary to $24,000 a year and at the end of 1994 my salary went up to $48,000 a year, which is just about where it is now.

I continued to grow the company — it had exponential growth through 2001. Besides New Jersey we had warehouses in Ohio, Colorado, Louisiana, and Washington D.C. While we were growing at an incredible rate, we were unable to afford the type of hierarchy necessary to maintain fiscal control. Having one warehouse was very easy to control. When you start having multiple warehouses you need an administration that can fly from place to place to make sure everybody was following the same rules. We did not have that type of funding. I was the responsible person signing the 990 form for the Internal Revenue Service and I knew that there were things taking place in our faraway warehouses over which I had no control, yet total responsibility.

At the end of 2001 I closed all of our other warehouses and forced the staff to either go independent or close down. I just could not be responsible for something I could not control. I then published our business plan on the Internet, encouraging other people to start their own organizations and offered to be their counselor and advisor to teach them everything I had learned. There are now over 70 organizations around the world that use my business plan to collect bicycles and ship them to developing countries. We don’t compete domestically because we come from different geographical areas, and internationally we do not compete because the need is so great.

I had just about balanced out how to operate with a smaller domestic footprint when the financial crisis of 2007 hit. Bike production continued to fall as people just didn’t have the money to buy new bikes. We are finally recovered from that and for the first time since 2001 bike production is on the rise. The sharp drop off in the bicycle production chart was initially my getting rid of the far-flung warehouses and then followed by the Great Recession.

I dabbled with a bunch of other products — computers, sporting goods, medical equipment — but I could not make the finances work to make those items self-sufficient. Then in 1999 we started collecting and shipping sewing machines.

Sewing machines, like bicycles, are readily available, have a long life expectancy, and help the recipient generate income. In 2015 we created the Sewing Peace brand as an option for carrying on our sewing machine activities separately from our bicycle activities. As of April 2017, we have shipped almost as many sewing machines as in all of last year, and I expect this year our sewing machine production will be up over 50%.

If one of your neighbors is in great distress, it is incumbent upon you that you help. You don’t want one of your closest neighbors to devolve into anarchy. It would be no good to have a crack house across the street. We live on a little rock in a giant void. Your grandchildren will have the ability to leave this neighborhood for a new one but you will probably be stuck on Earth all of your life.

We have somewhere between 180 and 190 very close neighbors. It is in our own national interest that our neighbors are successful. When our close neighbors devolve into anarchy it affects everyone. We can’t allow Ebola to thrive in West Africa. We can’t allow any human starvation. The entire world cannot move to the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. They need to be successful in their own right in their own country.

So what do they want? People everywhere want tomorrow to be better than today, next year better than this year, my kid’s life better than mine. These are universal.

The people in the developing world are some of the hardest working people anywhere. They just want the ability to go to work and have a job and make their lives better. The critical line there is “go to work”, just like how you have to go to school and your parents go to work. How much of your day would be wasted if you had to walk to school every day and then home again? Although things have changed somewhat, when I started in 1991 a majority of the people in the world did not have mankind’s greatest invention in their daily lives, the wheel. There were continents of people who walked everywhere they went. And why were they poor? Basic lack of mobility. Meanwhile, here in the United States we permanently removed from service millions of bicycles because they are the wrong color, or the wrong tire size.

So the mission of Pedals for Progress has been for us, and as many other organizations as we can convince, to collect bicycles and deliver them to our neighbors.

Why? So they can help themselves, lift themselves by their own bootstraps. You cannot lift another person out of poverty; they need to do it for themselves. By getting a person overseas a bicycle they can either get to work or get to school. When I started in Rivas, Nicaragua, the average student completed fourth grade. Today, 23,000 bicycles later, the average student completes high school because they can get to school and still get home to do the necessary chores on the farm.

While a bicycle will get someone to work, a sewing machine is a job in a box. A goodly percentage of the sewing machines we ship are used by men! People just want to work so they can support their family and have a good life.

I have won a huge long list of national and international awards. It was not self aggrandizement. I need to personally raise about a quarter million dollars per year. When you win a big award there are big cash prizes. I try to win awards for the money. $10 donations are great and I love them but when I won the Rolex Award I got $75,000! And a really nice watch.

In the beginning we shipped all of our bicycles to Nicaragua. Shipping only bicycles and only to Nicaragua tremendously limited our fundraising capacity and also left us very vulnerable. Countries change laws. You would think we would be welcome anywhere but there are many countries where we cannot get in and a few, such as Haiti, where I wouldn’t ship anything — no way no how! — which is pretty much true of most former French colonies. But that’s another longer discussion.

So we expanded out from Nicaragua, into El Salvador, then Fiji. We quickly realized that there was no way we could be totally successful in fund-raising without a sub-Saharan African program. We started in Ghana and still ship bicycles to that country. The first democratically elected president was Jerry Rawlings, and his wife loved bicycles and appreciated the economic miracle of China. They produced enough bicycles to mobilize their workforce so everybody got up and went to work.

Ghana was the first country in Africa to eliminate all import taxes on bicycles so it was a very easy place to start working. We developed all sorts of guidelines about how our programs should be run and that brings us up to the present day.

My body is relatively broken. I did too much myself and I picked up far too many bikes. I am much more of a paper pusher now out of necessity and I have staff that does the heavy manual work. I manage the domestic company, develop the international programs, and do all of the logistics for our cargo to disappear from here and reappear over there.

Moving forward

That should give you a pretty good idea of our history. Now, in 2017, bicycle production is on the rise, sewing machine production is phenomenally on the rise. We have a lot more local competition: small groups that collect hundreds of bikes to give to children here. The only problem is that they collect 10 times more than they give away and then call us and want us to take with no cash donation the bicycles that they have picked through. We don’t accept bicycles without a $10 donation. Our domestic cost is actually $18 per bike. Once one of these organizations picks all of the good bikes out of the pile what is left is junk.

Our overseas partners pay all international shipping costs. They pay for that because of the great value of the bicycles. Value is a function of supply and demand. In the United States there is an overwhelming supply of old bikes and absolutely no demand. That makes them valueless. Overseas there is an undersupply of bicycles and incredibly high demand. That makes them very valuable.

Our goal is to create a more vibrant economic marketplace overseas. We live in a capitalistic world. In a capitalistic society you distribute a commodity by selling it. People do not take care of things they are given and do not respect you for giving it. They will use the bike until they trash it and then just expect another to be given to them.

Our partners sell every bicycle, at low cost, because that is how the marketplace works. If you want to create a more vibrant economic marketplace you have to work within the rules of the capitalistic marketplace. Just because you sell the bicycle doesn’t mean you have to sell it at a high cost, but selling it is the only way to control the distribution.

A typical town has 10,000 to 20,000 people. Bikes arrive 500 a time. If you give away 500 bikes in a town of 10,000 people, 9500 people will hate you because they have been disenfranchised; they were never given a chance.

When the bicycles are sold instead of given away, everyone theoretically has an equal chance. The poorest of the poor will come in and want to see the least expensive bikes — bikes that need repair and that they will repair themselves. The son of the mayor comes in with money in his pocket and he wants the best bike. He can afford to pay for the best bike. By selling the best bikes for higher prices, our partners can then lower the price of the lower-end bikes so the poorest of the poor can afford them.

We collect many bikes that originally sold for well over $2500 and are light and fast. There are bike racers everywhere and they will pay $200 or $300 for a $2500 bike. Our partners sell a few of those and then they can sell some of the lower-end bikes for less than two dollars. The bikes are not apples and apples, they’re apples and oranges. The bikes must be valued overseas by their quality. A 24-speed Trek aluminum mountain bike that originally sold for $3000 should not be sold for the same price as a 20-inch one-speed bike that originally sold for $67.

Donate bicycles and sewing machines to developing countries