Bicycle Safety Education

Thanks to those who support the Silicon Valley Bicycle Exchange, we started 2016 by scheduling several new safety classes this year with Sunday Friends in San Jose! The Bicycle Exchange has been repairing and donating used bicycles for over 22 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 where the bicycles are distributed and provide helmets as well; the Home Sweet Home program was discontinued in 2014; however, we have been able to continuing offering safety classes as funding levels permit. 

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 are not resourced 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.

We now have safety classes scheduled for July, August and September this year! The photographs below are from a previous class and 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 year were held on January 17, February 7, March 13, April 17, May 1, and June 12. We have many more distributions planned for 2016 (about 24 distributions to multiple charities 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.