Pierre’s Pedal Project (PPP) was awarded a $3,200 Competitive Grant to provide professional bike mechanic training to volunteers and local students. This skills-based training improves their ability to refurbish and maintain bikes and increases their potential volunteer pool, with the end goal being to keep bikes out of the landfill. By multiple measures, they were highly successful in meeting their goal.
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“In addition to the smiles we see every time a child gets a new bike, here are a couple of other stories that made us feel good about our work.”
– John Beller, Board Member
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The Trike and the Hill
Last summer, Pierre’s Peddle Project spent an afternoon tuning up bikes for seniors for Senior West of the Tetons (SWOT). We had an adult trike that we had rebuilt, and SWOT advertised it on their website. During the event, a lady stopped by to try out the trike. She had been active all her life and loved her horses and riding, but her arthritis and other ailments had caused her to give up her horses and limited her ability to do much. She got on the trike and started to peddle. Her first words were, “Something is wrong with this bike.” The bike was fine, but her arthritic hands and one weak arm made it so she could not control the handlebars. We showed her how to push with her strong arm instead of trying to pull with her weak one, and she could control the bike. She said she would love to try the bike for a few days and asked if we could bring it to her house.
We feared the worst as we approached her house on the west side of the valley, in the Big Holes. The road to her house was on a hill and we could not see how she would be able to ride there. But she said she planned to ride around in her driveway. We dropped it off and hoped for the best.
A couple of days later, we received a text from her stating, “You have changed my life.” Our first thought was that she tried riding down that hill, and she ended up in the hospital. But this was not the case. She explained that the bike had allowed her to get motion she had not had in years. A few weeks later, we stopped by to visit, and she said she felt better than she had in years. She was thinking of riding her bike in the Fourth of July parade and was planning to ride through the winter in her horse barn.
The Junk Bike
During the Youth Repair Rendezvous, a young man brought in his bike that he wanted to work on, and it was in horrible shape with broken and rusted parts. Our first thought was to throw it in the junk pile. But the frame was good quality, and he appeared interested in rebuilding it. While most kids spent an hour at the event, this young man worked with one of our volunteers the entire day. But even after 6 hours of working on the bike, replacing new and re-used parts, it was still not ready to roll. So, he returned the following Saturday and finished the work. What could have been another example of our “throw-away” culture turned into an example of how, with diligence, you can make something new and useful again.
