The Village Bicycle Project’s Park City drive May 2 is one of dozens of collections across the U.S. and the United Kingdom.
Executive Director Joshua Poppel said after the bike drives, the nonprofit sends the goods to Sierra Leone and Ghana to improve the lives of locals.
“Particularly with the school children that we work with, they can be walking as much as 5, 6 miles each way to school, which is about a two-hour one-way journey,” he said on KPCW’s “Local News Hour” April 23. “The ability to get a bike into the hands of some of these kids, it reduces their travel time significantly.”
Bikes help the students get to school in about a third of the time. Poppel said that means they have more time to focus on their studies and family chores.
The project also gives bikes to health care workers so they can help more patients each day, and to rural farmers so they can carry greater loads to markets. Poppel said bikes are often shared among the community as well.
“If students are using it in the morning, their parents can use it in the afternoon to run errands,” he said. “Every bike that we distribute tends to impact three, four or five people.”
Poppel said the nonprofit ships about 20 containers — each with almost 500 bikes — to West Africa each year. The container from Utah holds bikes donated by the Salt Lake City Bike Collective, the Boise Bike Project and local bike shops.
Park City area residents, Poppel said, have provided about a quarter of Utah bicycles sent to Sierra Leonians and Ghanaians for the last six years.
The nonprofit accepts bicycles in usable condition as well as spare parts, helmets and cycling gear. Poppel said mountain bikes are best.
“Older mountain bikes are bread and butter. Ditto with any sort of hybrids or kind of city bikes, they all work well in the terrain that we typically see,” he said. “We also have a couple of nascent cycling teams in both Ghana and Sierra Leone, so we do take road bikes as well.”
Poppel said e-bikes are highly prized and often given to health care workers to provide the most positive impact on communities.
The Park City drive is May 2 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the Staples and Walmart parking lot in Kimball Junction. Poppel said financial donations are also encouraged to offset the price of shipping.
