This Christmas we donated another 20 bicycles to “Shtwpiza e Ngjyrave”, “House of Colors”. This house is a kids’ center that hosts more than 120 children every day. These children are in a “street situation”, working and begging. “Make them smile” is the campaign of bike donations. This is the seventh kids’ center P4P bicycles have supported, with more than 100 children’s bicycles, used by more than 600 poor, abandoned children. Our volunteers have scheduled every Wednesday to spend 1 hour at these centers to teach them cycling and have a good time together. Yes, together we can “make them smile again”.
We recently received a great holiday email from our Guatemalan Partners ECOLOBICI:
Hi David,
We have just finished the inventory of our last container. The shipment looks great with the sewing machines that will go to a women’s group in a community outside of San Andrés Itzapa. The shipment of parts and soccer equipment will also go to great use. Everyone is excited for the upcoming World Cup in Brazil this summer.
Please see some photos below and wishing you and your family a happy new year.
When I won the Rolex award in 2000, I convinced the Board to start a Capital Campaign for building a permanent facility. While we raised significant funds, we never met our goal. Furthermore it has since been decided our resources are better off helping people, than owning a facility and we have excellent rental space. When the banks collapsed in 2007 we had approximately $110,000 in the capital campaign. I wrote to all the donors and requested that they release that money so that we could use it for general expenses. Most donors released their donation. Those funds helped us stay operational through the entire recession.
There is however $10,411 that has never been officially released by the donors. In part because of how long ago these funds were donated, the addresses we had on file the mail was returned. Further complicated by Hurricane Sandy and multiple computer meltdowns, we no longer even have these bad addresses. It is my belief that these funds were donated by well-intentioned people who wanted their money to go to making a substantive long-term change in society. These funds were dedicated specifically to the Pedals for Progress Capital Campaign. The residual restricted funds could languish on the books of P4P providing no value to anyone. The Board feels that this is specifically contrary to what the donors intended. Furthermore since this money was dedicated specifically for “a” Capital Campaign, it should be used for such.
Pedals for Progress, a New Jersey nonprofit corporation, is hereby posting official notice to all of the original Capital Campaign contributors. If you are one of these original donors, we no longer have your address. Please write or email P4P with your name, address, amount of your donation, and instructions on what to do with your donation. You may instruct that P4P return of the donation to you, or that the donation may be used by P4P to fund ongoing operations without restriction. If we do not hear from you, the remaining Capital Campaign monies will be donated to the Hunterdon Medical Center (HMC) Cardiopulmanary Capital Campaign three months after the posting of this notice. HMC is the local hospital that most of our employees use when necessary. The Board feels that we are fulfilling our duty to the donors by giving this money, first to a capital campaign and, secondly to something that will make a long-term substantive change that we believe remains the intent of the original Capital Campaign donors.
Pedals for Progress seeks to stimulate the economy of developing countries through its work. This would be impossible without the cooperation and tireless efforts of its partners throughout the world. One such partner is Wright Enterprises, a company that imports consumer goods to Ghana. Working in conjunction with P4P, Wright Enterprises founded WEBike, an organization that, for little to no profit, distributes bikes and sewing machines to those in need of them. Here is a selection of stories of Ghanaians whose lives have benefited from the work of P4P and WEBike.
1. Usifu is a student teacher in the small town of Walewale in the Northern Region of Ghana. A limited staff at his school means that Usifu must perform multiple duties. First and foremost, he teaches a fourth grade class. Additionally, before morning lessons begin, the students sweep the classrooms and school compound, a job Usifu must be present for to oversee and provide assistance with. There is a distance of 4 kilometers (about 2½ miles) between Usifu’s home and the school. Having to walk made it difficult for him to arrive before the start of classes to complete his duties in time. Furthermore, traveling by foot daily would leave him exhausted, not to mention would cut into the time Usifu, like any teacher, needed to prepare for upcoming lessons. Now, thanks to WEBike, Pedals for Progress’ partner in Ghana, Usifu rides a bicycle to and from school each day. This drastically decreases his travel time, giving him more of the time and energy he needs to do his job. He can now get to school on the dot and is prepared and focused every day when he enters the classroom.
2. In some Ghanaian villages, it is common practice for citizens to pursue auto mechanic apprenticeships. It is a worthwhile career track for many people as, once they have become proficient in the field, they can bring their talents to the bigger cities where the need for mechanics can translate into a lucrative job. Paa Joe is a young man hoping to procure such a position. An apprentice in the Suhum/Kraboa/Coaltar District in the Eastern Region of Ghana, Paa Joe must traverse a distance of 5 kilometers (or over 3 miles) to get from his residence to where he is learning his future trade. Formerly, his only transportation option was one very early bus that would get him to his apprenticeship before the workday proper began. If he missed this bus, he was forced to walk. Either approach left him exhausted. After receiving a bicycle from WEBike, Paa Joe became able to bike to and from his auto mechanic apprenticeship every day. Functioning on his own schedule, he is now energized in his work and much more hopeful that he will one day be able to move to the city to begin a profitable career.
3. Yaw Aboah is a gristmill operator in Kasoa, a suburb in the Central Region. Long work hours and a distance of 3 kilometers (about 2 miles) between his house and his workplace meant that Yaw was often forced to sleep at the mill. Obviously, this was far from ideal as an industrial building hardly possesses conditions conducive to a good night’s rest. Worse, however, was that sleeping at work would mean Yaw would typically not see his family for days at a time and, further, often had to spend money on meals away from home. Thanks to the bike he’s received, staying overnight at the gristmill isn’t even something Yaw has to take into consideration. He is able to bike easily to and from work every day, providing him with a more economical lifestyle and, most important of all, giving him back his time with his family.
4. Nana Yaw teaches a sixth grade class at the LA Middle School in Nsawam, a town in Ghana’s Eastern Region. He lives quite far away in a small village called Ayakwah, on the outskirts of the Nsawam area. Covering this distance daily was a huge issue for Nana, but then he received the gift of a bike from WEBike. He can now go between school and home much faster and with much less effort. He is thankful to WEBike for this, as well as for providing him with the means to perform various errands and to travel around the area with ease.
5. Coming from a poor background, Ama Attah became a seamstress’ apprentice, hoping to learn and eventually use the skill to improve her family’s financial standing. However, shortly after the completion of her apprenticeship, Ama’s sewing machine was one day accidentally knocked from a table to the ground, damaging it beyond repair. As a result of WEBike’s intervention, Ama received another, working sewing machine. She is overjoyed that she can now put the sewing skills she worked so hard to learn to use and can make money to support herself and her family.
6. Esi is a teenager who lives in a small village in the Nkwanta North District of the Volta Region. She is a student at Nkwanta Senior High School. The school is located so far away from where Esi lives that it would take her two hours to walk there. With the school day beginning at 7AM, Esi had no choice but to be up every morning well before 5 in order to be sure to get to class on time. Furthermore, the road she travels on is frequently a busy one, making her daily trek all the more arduous and slow-going. All of these factors contributed to Esi’s fatigue, which was obviously detrimental to her health, especially at a developmental age. It also made it difficult for her to be attentive during school and hard for her to dedicate energy to schoolwork in and out of class. After receiving her bicycle from WEBike, Esi found she was able to negotiate the distance between school and home within an hour, sometimes even managing it in 45 minutes. She is no longer unnecessarily exhausted and is sure to be on time, prepared, and fully alert in class each day.
7. Efoe Kojo lives in Nkwanta in the Volta Region and works as a harvester. Going to and from the field where he works, he had to walk a distance of 6 kilometers (over 3½ miles) in total daily. He also had to carry with him a canteen of water, his lunch, and the machete with which he does his work. This proved to be a serious problem for Efoe as he would repeatedly, upon reaching the field, find himself too tired to do any harvesting. Now that Efoe has his bicycle from Pedals for Progress and WEBike, he is no longer too exhausted to perform his duties. Not only does his bike transport him to work quickly and easily, but, rather than lug his supplies around himself, he can put everything in the bike’s basket.
8. The partnership with Pedals for Progress doesn’t just benefit those on the receiving end. Joe is an employee with WEBike, distributing bikes around the Kasoa area in the Central Region of Ghana. Thanks to his involvement with WEBike, the people of the Kasoa area now know to go to Joe for reasonably priced bicycles. The money he is making helps him support his family. He is able to afford his rent and pay for any fees that might arise from his children’s schooling.
9. In Accra, the capital city of Ghana, there are many boys and girls who, after finishing high school, wish to learn to sew. Maame Yaa is a seamstress who runs an apprenticeship program training young people to be seamstresses and tailors. She would not have been able to offer this education without all of the sewing machines she received from WEBike for the children to train on. With her program as a springboard, many of Maame Yaa’s students are able to become self-employed and Maame herself profits from her business, all thanks to the sewing machines from WEBike and Pedals for Progress.
Pedals for Progress’ partnership with the Social Stimulating Alternative Programs (SSAP) in Albania has led to the founding of a number of initiatives that have not only bettered people’s lives, but the country’s environment as well. The first of these was the Ecovolis bike-sharing system—based in the country’s capital of Tirana—which helps to circulate donated bicycles throughout Albania. An extension of this system, the Ecovolis Service, has built up a countrywide reputation for its reliability in the repair and maintenance of bikes.
Employees at the bike-sharing kiosk in Tirana, Albania
There is also the Eco Bicycle Shop, the biggest bicycle shop in Albania. In under two years, the shop has repaired, sold, and put around 2000 bikes back on the streets of Tirana, as well as other urban and rural areas. Furthermore, the shop provides training on the repairing and selling of P4P-donated bicycles to young people, thereby preparing them for employment.
One of the major goals of the SSAP is to provide jobs for members of communities in need and, so far, the SSAP has employed approximately 50 people, many of whom are students, to assist in the operation of its various services. Aside from repairing and selling bikes, 10 students earn money riding advertisement-toting bikes around for SSAP’s newest venture, Green Advertising. These used bikes have been modified to function as mobile advertisements for companies who have embraced this new, economical, and environmentally-friendly method of advertising.
I Recycle employee collecting plastic and aluminum waste
Another of the SSAP’s most recent projects that seeks to improve environmental conditions in Albania’s capital is called “I Recycle.” Typically, a method of survival for the hundreds of struggling families of the Roma community is to search through public garbage bins in order to find and collect paper, plastic, and aluminum. They then take this recyclable waste to be exchanged for a very low profit. Commonly, this process means that much of the unrecyclable waste is removed from the bins and left to scatter about the streets.
The Roma people need bicycles to transport the goods they collect as well as to efficiently check all the bins in a given area. To accomplish this, they either share a bike, using it in shifts, or, unfortunately, resort to stealing bicycles from the Ecovolis bike-sharing system. Those unable to procure a bicycle instead opt to search the tons of garbage disposed of daily in landfills. Frequently, this job is left to the Roma children, who chase the garbage trucks as soon as they are spotted, in an effort to be the first to get a chance find recyclables in the trash. Perhaps it goes without saying that these children are not attending school.
In response to these problems, the SSAP came up with “I Recycle,” a multi-part, long-term solution. First, over 100 bicycles were donated to the Roma community in Tirana, markedly reducing the number of bicycle thefts as well as moving toward eliminating the need for children to chase garbage trucks and make visits to landfills. Second, to put an end to all of the digging around in bins and to reduce the amount of litter on the streets, the SSAP manufactured and distributed color-coded garbage bin structures around Tirana. Each of the structures is divided into four bins: one for paper, one for plastic, one for aluminum, and one for other waste. With their new bicycles and the recyclables now already properly divided up, the Roma people can make their collections more quickly and simply, thus increasing their incomes.
The eventual goal, however, is to systemize this practice and provide the Roma people with long-term occupations. Working with the municipality of Tirana, the SSAP has begun this process by employing the Roma and providing them with cargo bicycles specifically constructed for the collection and transport of recyclable materials. The money collected from exchanging these recyclables is then put toward the employees’ salaries and the maintenance of their bicycles. Only adults are employed as the SSAP strictly forbids the use of child labor. In adopting this system, Tirana is gradually becoming one of the first cities worldwide that has a recycling process based entirely on bicycle transport, helping to reduce the need for and pollution from huge garbage trucks.
I Recycle rickshaw in the streets of Tirana, Albania
Sinan and Neritan were the first of the Roma community to become employees in the “I Recycle” program. Previously, their families would scrounge through landfill garbage, ultimately not earning even half of what Sinan and Neritan earn now. It gives them great pride to be able to begin new lives for their families and to be a part of the cause toward making Tirana a cleaner city. Furthermore, with the SSAP taking a strong stance against child labor, a condition of this employment is that the children of families with employees in the SSAP begin attending school. It is clearly fundamentally wrong for a childhood to be spent scavenging in landfills. This problem is increasingly being phased out as Sinan, Neritan, and other members of the Roma community can now provide their sons, daughters, sisters, and brothers with the educations they deserve.
None of this would have been possible without the donations of used bicycles from the American people that have been shipped to Albania by Pedals for Progress for over three years. The partnership between P4P and the Social Stimulating Alternative Programs was originally begun in 2010 with the goal of reintroducing bicycles to an automobile-centric society in order to decrease pollution and provide citizens with a healthy transportation alternative. However, this initial goal has been greatly expanded upon with bicycles being distributed throughout rural and urban areas, providing assistance to those in need. Companies are even finding the bikes to be useful as vehicles for advertising. Moreover, formerly a completely non-recycling community, the capital city of Tirana is making great strides toward accepting and adapting to the “I Recycle” system. In doing so, living conditions have improved and previously needy people have found employment.
The progress is encouraging and has fostered interest from other needy communities in Albania. However, in order to spread the “I Recycle” project and create more jobs countrywide, contributions and bicycle donations remain as vital as ever. With every bicycle donated, there is the potential for more successes—like those of Sinan and Neritan—in Albania. Every bicycle means one more opportunity to liberate a child from days spent fruitlessly scouring landfills for a few recyclable goods to instead give them a proper education and hope for a better life.
Esi is a teenager who lives in a small village in the Nkwanta North District of the Volta Region. She is a student at Nkwanta Senior High School. The school is located so far away from where Esi lives that it would take her two hours to walk there. With the school day beginning at 7AM, Esi had no choice but to be up every morning well before 5 in order to be sure to get to class on time. Furthermore, the road she travels on is frequently a busy one, making her daily trek all the more arduous and slow-going. All of these factors contributed to Esi’s fatigue, which was obviously detrimental to her health, especially at a developmental age. It also made it difficult for her to be attentive during school and hard for her to dedicate energy to schoolwork in and out of class. After receiving her bicycle from WEBike, Esi found she was able to negotiate the distance between school and home within an hour, sometimes even managing it in 45 minutes. She is no longer unnecessarily exhausted and is sure to be on time, prepared, and fully alert in class each day.
Throughout the cities of western and northern Europe public bicycle services have been established that encourage and increase the use of bicycles as healthy and ecologically-sound transport. Through these services subscribers can rent bikes in easily accessible locations throughout the city and when finished return them to any other convenient station in the network. PASS has long wished to emulate this type of system in Albania and by the end of December, 2010 we will have four stations set up around Tirana, the capital. Tirana Community Bicycle, the first bicycle-sharing program in the Balkans, is an initiative of the PASS organization undertaken with funding support from the Open Society Foundation of Albania (OSFA is a Soros Foundation democratization program for Albania) and a generous contribution from Pedals for Progress, which donated the first 500 bicycles. Thanks to P4P’s contribution, our project was implemented and we were encouraged to advance and expand it.
The city of Tirana, and especially its center, is quite suitable for transportation by bicycle. The downtown area is dense, the terrain is flat, and the climate is mild. The short distances and easy conditions make cycling a fast and practical way of moving in the center of the city, and may be the best means of meeting the needs of the citizens of Tirana.
Given the heavy traffic situation in the center of the city and air pollution from CO2 emissions, we believe that this service will be a valuable contribution to the community. PASS has been promoting the new system for some time before the placement of the public bicycle stations. In the course of our other social activities, and in conjunction with our P4P-supported bike retail shop EcoVolis, we have involved the citizens of Tirana by soliciting suggestions regarding form, logo, and slogan. We have also organized awareness activities with the young people of Tirana. For instance, on September 22nd, a national activity day called “A Day Without Cars,” we distributed over 200 bicycles in the Youth Park, Mother Theresa Square, and the Ministry of Education for the “transport by bicycle” learning activity. In January, we will donate 30 bicycles and organize bike training for the children.
We hope that the Tirana Community Bicycle service will be properly consolidated in 2011, with a targeted number of daily uses of the public bicycles by citizens. By doing this we wish to promote the use of bicycles as a mode of transport for commuting or performing other daily activities and increase their use in our city.
May 18th, 2013, marked the shipment of the 52nd container of bicycles to EcoBici in Rivas, Nicaragua. Our relationship with this organization is the longest in our 23 years of partnership building. This current delivery contains 580 bikes that add to the 22,044 cycles already in circulation in the region and will contribute to the organization’s goal of community development and focus on enabling much-needed reforestation in the region.
P4P is also pleased to add 6 sewing machines to the container shipment. Our readers are of course already familiar with the Clif Bar Family Foundation’s steady and generous support of our programs and so it is not unexpected that the shipping and import taxes have been covered by them. What is new here is that the sewing machines are destined for a different locale in the region. In April, we were contacted by Noelle London, a Peace Corps volunteer who is involved in small business development in Nicaragua. London wrote that she lives on Ometepe, an island close to Rivas. This island, situated on Lake Nicaragua, is steadily becoming a tourist destination and she informed us that, currently, most of the souvenirs visitors purchase there tend to be made in Granada or Masaya.
London informed us that, with reliable and efficient tools, the local women could develop a thriving base of manufacture in their community of Balgüe: “They have begun to sell in a couple of locations on the island and even in a fair in Managua but are unable to keep up with the current demand as they only have 3 working machines.”
This region is ideal for building a tourist trade in local crafts as there are many attractions to draw steady crowds yearly. The beaches on the island of Ometepe are black volcanic sand, and the lake, long separated from the ocean by an earthquake, is an ideal location to observe the many species who have adapted to this environment. Lake Nicaragua is the only lake in the world with very large freshwater sharks. Tours of the island include trips to Altagracia and its Pre-Columbian stone statues and to Magdalena Farm in Balgüe where organic coffee is grown. It is a lush land with fertile soil fed from the Volcano Maderas.
London included this statement in her e-mail to us: “I have normally been the one to shy [local women] away from donations, as they have to eventually [establish] a fully sustainable business as opposed to a project. However, after working with them on productivity countless times, I have come to understand that they simply lack the sufficient resources to really take off.” What stands out to us at P4P is London’s very realistic take on the development of self sufficiency. Charity does not build business infrastructure. Long-term goals, reliable tools, and ongoing training programs are the only hope for people in places like Ometepe to foil the existence of questionably sourced “authentic” souvenirs of their own region and take control of the industry for themselves. This is a beneficial situation for visitors of the region as well, of course. Value is added to the experience of visiting a country where the textiles and other mementos are made by local people and cooperatives. Even better if a visit to the places of manufacture are part of a tour itinerary.
“It has been a pleasure to work with these motivated and talented women. They have dealt with countless obstacles and have continued to fight to keep their business afloat,” states London. P4P is very happy to see the contents of one container contribute to an old reliable partnership in Rivas and a new and promising one on Ometepe.
Donate bicycles and sewing machines to developing countries
