By Joanne Heidkamp
Fall 2018 InGear/InStitch

[The partnership between the Green Mountain Returned Peace Corps Volunteers and P4P goes waaaaay back. They started their P4P collections in 1999. Twelve years later, they wrote this Recipe for Collecting Bikes. In 2014, they collected their 3000th bike. Now, in fall 2018, they sent us another truckload of bikes and sewing machines. Here’s the report.]

Hi David and Lori:

Our 2018 collection on Saturday September 29th was successful. We loaded 193 bikes and 75 sewing machines into 4 FedEx containers.

The two miniature bike mechanics Noah (age 5) and Melek (age 3) arrived at 8:30 a.m. to donate Noah’s outgrown bike. They stayed on, with their parents, until we closed up the truck at 1:30. They never stopped working. They strapped pedals to the frames, they greeted people bringing bikes and sewing machines, and they looked everyone straight in the eye and said, “Will you be donating $10 for shipping by check or with cash?” Quite a few people ended up donating extra.

Unfortunately, the quality of bikes is down this year. About 100 of the bikes came from some rural churches that held mini-collections—even after we eliminated the bikes with obvious rust, there are still quite a few marginal bikes in the load.

We are also feeling the impact of Old Spokes Home, a local bike shop plus non-profit that has expanded considerably in the past couple of years. They hold several big collections a year. At this point they are probably skimming 500–800 high-quality bikes a year from the local donation pool. It’s hard for us to compete with their impressive local accomplishments in providing transportation and skills to local teens, refugees, people who can’t drive or don’t have cars, guys on parole, etc. It’s an excellent project. They have donated bikes to P4P when they have a surplus. They get bikes from college campuses in the spring, and from local police departments—both are sources we can not tap into because we don’t have storage, and we don’t want to have to fundraise the $10 per bike.

We also loaded 4 cases of brand new bicycle seats donated by Terry Bicycles, a women-focused bike clothing and accessories company located in Burlington. Our contact at Terry is Colin Sturgess, the operations manager. Colin was the manager at FedEx who first provided us free shipping to New Jersey, back around 2000. He saw our truck in the KMart parking lot last year and left a note sending good wishes. We followed up, and this year he invited us to do outreach at Terry’s annual tent sale in August, and made the offer of donated bike seats as well.

The quality of the sewing machines is up. Half of the machines were collected by Mary O’Brien in Springfield, who checks each one carefully before turning them over to us. The other half came in on Saturday—a lot of nice 1980s portables in their own cases, as well as several Bernina overlock sergers, which are fantastic for sewing knits. We also loaded a 1930s Singer with a knee controller.

Mary O’Brien works in solid waste management for the Southern Windsor County Regional Planning Commission, southeast of Burlington. She has been collecting sewing machines for us since 2014. This year she collected 36 machines that she had individually tested. The solid waste district covers the $10 per item. We are in awe of her!