Tag Archives: bicycles

Belize, bicycles

Belize Visit, Spring 2023

By Alan Schultz
Spring 2023 Newsletter

In the spring of 2022, Pedals for Progress embarked on an exciting partnership with P4P Belize, marking our most recent destination in Central America. We have now made three shipments to P4P Belize and feel that the program has found its stride and will be in a comfortable position to continue the revolving fund system we aim to achieve with our partners. Finding partnerships that can maintain consecutive shipments creates sustainable projects that will make a deeper impact in the communities they serve.

To solidify our connection with the new program in Belize, I had the privilege of visiting the country and meeting Derrick Pitts, the CEO and executive director of P4P Belize, also known as God Cares Outreach within the country. I encourage you to read our previous posts on their programs. While I was visiting, I was able to get a better sense of their operation and their remarkable goals.

P4P Belize is a community outreach organization situated in South Side Belize City, focusing on empowering their neighbors and helping them overcome poverty. Located away from the tourist areas in the north, South Side Belize City faces numerous challenges on multiple fronts.

Leading up to my trip, I was doing research of what to expect in Belize and one recurring piece of advice was to avoid South Side Belize City due to higher crime rates resulting from extreme poverty and other factors.

However, South Side Belize City holds a special significance for Derrick, as it is where he grew up and spent most of his life. It is home to him. While I was working on some bikes, cleaning and reassembling them in preparation for sale, Derrick asked me how it felt to be in the most dangerous part of the city. I replied that I felt perfectly safe. Thanks to Derrick’s assistance and hospitality, I was given the opportunity to explore this overlooked area of the country and meet the people who call it home.

Through our revolving fund system, Derrick can recoup the costs of shipping by selling the items that we send him. Going around the city, we visited the local bike shops that sell Chinese-made bicycles that one would typically find in big box stores in the United States. Brand new bicycles in these shops sell for $200 to $500 in Belize. There are also high-end stores where bikes from brands like Specialized, Giant, Trek, and others are sold for $1,000 to $5,000. With the bikes we send, Derrick can comfortably compete with these stores, offering the community quality bikes for less.

The impact of this partnership is significant. By offering affordable and reliable transportation options, we are not only improving the lives of individuals but also creating economic development in communities like South Side Belize City. Together, we are breaking barriers and creating opportunities for those who need it most.

P4P Belize has several community outreach programs aimed at aiding people throughout Belize City and other parts of the country. Part 2 of this report describes these programs and illustrate how P4P Belize goes beyond distributing bicycles in their community.

bicycles, Kosovo

covid-19 crisis in kosovo

By Kushtrim Gojani, GoBike
Summer 2021 Newsletter

The Coronavirus pandemic found Kosovo unprepared, as was the case with most countries of the world. For a considerable part of 2020 the whole country was in lockdown. Following the peak of cases in late 2020 and early 2021, infections have steadily declined since early April 2021. As of late June 2021, there have been 107K Covid-19 cases in Kosovo, and 2255 deaths.

On 28 March 2021 Kosovo received the very first contingent of 24,000 doses of vaccines through COVAX. Up until then, Kosovo was was the only country in Europe without any vaccines. The vaccination of the population has started and is progressing slowly. By the end of this year we hope everyone will have a chance to get vaccinated.

The Impact of the Pandemic on GoBike

Partnering with Pedals for Progress has been crucial to getting the GoBike social enterprise going. Through our partnership we have managed to set up the enterprise, sell bicycles to beneficiaries from all walks of life, organize cycling events, and teach people how to ride a bike. Despite the initial success in 2018 and 2019 with the first container of bicycles, a year and a half later the pandemic forced us to cancel our work completely, as ordered by the Government of Kosovo. We have been closed for the entire 2020 season. Receiving the second container from Pedals for Progress had also to be put on hold.

In October 2020 GoBike teamed up yet again with AYA ‘Pjetër Bogdani’ to organize “Cycling Schools” to teach even more kids in Pristina how to ride a bike. Cycling Schools were quite popular and sought after. One can never have enough of such events, as the demand is high, particularly amongst children.

The Cycling Schools took place in the Dardania elementary school yard in Pristina. They were free of charge. In the past, the motivation of GoBike to organize such activities had been to contribute to the growing of the cycling community of Pristina; help young girls and boys grow independent; provide a cycling experience to the adults who have never experienced cycling before; and reduce carbon emissions into the air by promoting cycling as a more sustainable way of transport. This time, we had an additional reason. Through cycling schools we wanted to work with as many people as possible who have spent a lot of their time indoors without much physical activity, and get them back to bicycles and an active lifestyle —very important for their health and wellbeing.

We hope that normality will be restored soon. At GoBike, we hope to be able to resume our work and receive a new container of bicycles from P4P.  This should provide us with sufficient stimulation to pick the work right where we left off.

bicycles, Peace Corps, South Africa

Corporate Largess and the Cape-to-Cape Trek

By Dave Schweidenback
Fall 2020 Newsletter

Back in the 1990s Pedals for Progress had a relationship with Bell Sports, at the time the largest distributor of bikes and bike parts in the United States and Canada. Bell Sports donated millions of dollars of new bicycle parts, including the bicycle that David Loveland rode from South Cape, South Africa, to North Cape, Norway.

Take a moment and think of yourself as the executive running a massive parts distribution company. How do you know you sold every single part you could have sold? The answer is there must be one left over. If you sell every one of an individual part, how do you know you couldn’t have sold more? Therefore it behooves these distributors to have a small amount of excess to prove their efficiency. The problem is that the excess needs to disappear.

Before the Bell–P4P relationship, that excess product would be ground up and put in a landfill at great expense. By donating all of that product to Pedals for Progress, Bell got a tax deduction for the value of the product they gave us. The trick was that the product had to be destroyed.

In this case, destruction means permanent removal from their market. The Bell Sports corporate footprint was the United States and Canada. If the donated products were removed from the United States and Canada, they were theoretically “destroyed”.

Over an eight year period, Pedals for Progress received over $10 million of new parts from Bell Sports.

In 1993 I received an email from David Loveland. He was approaching his close of service as a Peace Corps volunteer serving in Malawi, East Africa. He had a dream of bicycling from South Cape, South Africa, to North Cape, Norway. He was going to fund the trip himself. He just needed a bike. On one hand, this is not what Pedals for Progress does, but on the other hand there was a man with a dream and maybe I could help. I contacted my contact at Bell Sports, Jim Keller, and told him about this young man who wanted to bicycle halfway across the world, south to north. After some mild negotiating, Bell Sports gave us a brand-new Trek bicycle and some accessories, which we got to Malawi. Dave did the rest.

I remember conspiring with his mother to try to convince him to stay safe in the routes he took.

I also remember the story of the danger of frogs on the road in Slovakia. These great big frogs sit out on the road and if you hit one you just slide off the road into the bushes.

I recently heard from David. He still has the bicycle. I had a Cape-to-Cape T-shirt in a frame at the office and I sent it to him. He wrote a great trip report for this newsletter.