Bicycle Safety Education

Safety Education Update
By Dave Fork - President, Silicon Valley Bicycle Exchange

Smiling girl

Dear Friends,

In the third quarter of 2015 the Silicon Valley Bicycle Exchange offered its monthly donations of refurbished bicycles at Sunday Friends in San Jose. We have been repairing and donating used bicycles for over 21 years now, and several years ago, thanks to a generous grant from Google's Home Sweet Home program, we were able to hire instructors to teach safety classes at the events were the bicycles are distributed and provide helmets as well; unfortunately, the Home Sweet Home program was discontinued in 2014, which is why we were so pleased to be invited to list our project with GlobalGiving. This quarter we had enough funds donated to place a bulk order of helmets so that these can be provided to recipients in the coming months.

The Silicon Valley Bicycle Exchange is a member of the League of American Bicyclists and the instructors that it hires are certified by that organization and have received extensive training for conducting instruction in both on-road and classroom settings. The classes that are taught concentrate on our youth recipients as we seek to instill safe and effecting cycling habits early on. Your donations to our safety education program are also used to purchase safety equipment such as helmets, lights and reflectors.

The safety classes are organized in cooperation with the partner organizations that distribute our bikes. We learned early on that in order to effectively reach the members in our community who are most in need, we needed to work with social service organizations who understand and work with these clients on a regular basis. Most often, our partner organizations to not have the resources to hire instructors to provide safety instruction to their clients. Your donation goes a long way because our partner organizations provide in-kind support in the form of staff time to schedule, organize and support the safety classes on site at their events.

Our most recent safety educaton event was held on June 14th at Lowell Elementary School in San Jose, CA with our partner organization, Sunday Friends.  The photographs we have included show young boys and girls together with their instructors and mentors as they prepare for and go through the safety training exercises.  Weeks before this day the youth began earning tickets to "buy" their bicycles by giving back to the community in the following ways:

• Families start and end each program by cleaning the grounds of the school that hosts our programs. On warm days, children wash the playground equipment and benches.
• In every program, children create craft gifts for people who have different disadvantages in life than they do. They give to residents of senior centers, children in hospitals, overseas communities, injured veterans and disabled individuals.
• Children collaborate with volunteers to prepare and serve nutritious food to everyone in the program.
• Parents and children write and illustrate hundreds of personal thank you letters to Sunday Friends’ supporters each program.
• In these ways and many more, all participants help each other to bring out their best and learn.

You can learn more about a day at Sunday Friends here.

Bike donation events to Sunday Friends this quarter were held on July 11, July 25 and September 12. We have many more distributions planned throughout the year (about 24 distributions and approximately 600 bikes in total) so we are hopeful that with continuing support we will be able to schedule additional safety classes as well.

Adjusting helmet

Instruction on the blacktop