15,000 Bikes, 653 Kids, 310 Volunteers, ONE INCREDIBLE DAY!!!
WOW! Our 19th annual Holiday Kids Bike Giveaway is in the books, and it was incredible! A day filled with raucous laughter, wall-to-wall smiles, a few happy tears, and as many bicycles as you can imagine in one place - a day that was so fundamentally good, so soulful.
On Saturday we experienced so many wonderful moments - Shifting Gears program participants teaching safety lessons to kids riding the bikes that they built, volunteers reconnecting with families they had met in prior years, young people for whom a bicycle provided so much comfort and joy during their fight with pediatric cancer, or simply kids who just wouldn’t get off that bicycle no matter what! Too many stories to list of bubble-popping human connections facilitated by bicycles.
It was also another reminder that the Holiday Kids Bike Giveaway is such an audacious event (650 bikes?!) that it simply can’t be successful without community members of all walks of life showing up and doing their part - staff, donors, members, volunteers and especially the 650+ kids themselves – daring to dream, inspiring hope and confidence for what lies ahead.
In serendipitous timing, BBP distributed our 15,000th total giveaway bicycle during this year’s HKBG event. It's mind-boggling to think about 15,000 young people riding around on volunteer-built BBP bicycles, empowered to live their lives on their own terms, connecting to opportunities and riding on to become the leaders of our community.
For every single kid receiving one of those 15,000 bicycles, there’s a dozen people that have a hand in the process to get it to that one kid… whether that’s donating the bicycle, teaching someone how to fix it, sizing the bicycle to the kid, teaching a safety lesson - there’s just a huge community embrace to get that kid up and rolling.
If you think about that in relation to every single one of the 15,000 bicycles we’ve paired with kids, we’re now talking about hundreds of thousands of people who are coming together in order to commit acts of service for one another, and that’s a beautiful thing. That’s a powerful thing. A reminder that when we come together for the right reasons, we can do BIG things!
That’s the moral of the HKBG and the spirit it inspires in our community every single day, that together we can make incredible impact - we can make sure everyone has access to sustainable transportation, we can organize to fight for safe streets in our cities for every single road user, and we can continue to build a community that reflects our values - where no matter who you love, what you look like, or where you are from - you are safe, supported and welcome.
Please know how full to the brim our hearts are here at BBP, how grateful we are to be part of this community, and that, as always, all are welcome to join the ride!
Devin McComas & the team at the Boise Bicycle Project
