You know Pedals for Progress (www.p4p.org) because we have had great success recycling used American bicycles from the greater New York City / Philadelphia area. In fact we have collected and shipped more than 150,000 bikes to developing nations to spur economic growth. What you might not know is we have a sideline which we hope will become almost as important. We have shipped over 4000 sewing machines!
While a bicycle will get an individual to work, to school, to play and generally improve their life, a sewing machine is a job in a box. The personal elimination of poverty requires employment. P4P has long had in its mission to create economic opportunity. The bicycle is not a handout; you still have to pedal to make it successful. Likewise a good portable sewing machine gives certain individuals the ability to immediately earn income.
We have a very specific plan for collecting bicycles—one-day, three-hour events—and we do collect many sewing machines at our bicycle collections. But we need an alternative cost-effective way to more successfully harvest the sewing machines sitting in closets and to do it year round.
P4P would like to assemble a cadre of people who could serve as local collection points in an ongoing collection of sewing machines. If we could find some volunteers who could save up to 20 sewing machines in the corner of their garage, it’s then cost-effective to send out the truck to pick them up. I tell our partners overseas that P4P is item-rich cash-poor and it is true. In many ways we work as a trucking company and need to be mindful of all of the transportation costs from the time we get a sewing machine from the donor until it is delivered to a recipient overseas.
Our bicycle collections are limited to just the months during the spring and fall. Once we have a large number of sewing machine collection points we will be able to be fully operational 12 months of year. P4P will still collect bicycles only six months a year in the same way we have in the past, but if we run sewing machine collections independently of bike collections we hope to get to 1000 sewing machines per year starting in 2017, which would be a threefold increase in sewing machine production.
We will also need more tinkerers, to help clean up and refurbish the machines as they come in. If you have a little space and are willing to help please contact Dave at dschweidenback@gmail.com or 908-638-8893.