Featured Volunteer: Evan

Evan will be earning his Eagle rank very soon. He is a member of troop 249 and helped us collect over 300 bikes over the last couple years. He became aware of Bikes for the World when he worked on a fellow scout's project at Blair HS. Luke collected over 200 bikes and ran a very busy event, where Evan definitely got up to speed on compacting bikes. 

Earlier this year Evan contacted us to set up a date for his Eagle project, also collecting bikes at Blair. Evan managed to find over 80 bikes which were sent to El Salvador and Burkina Faso in June. The bikes donated to Burkina Faso were just distributed last month. 

Evan had a lot to manage that day. In addition to the bikes, the donors, and his volunteers, Evan battled the weather. He had one of the stormiest collections perhaps every on record with BfW. He rallied his troops more than once to take cover in cars while violent thunderstorms passed by. We've had rains and winds and snows and even the threat of a hurricane that in the end fizzled out over the years, but as our climate continues to change we are seeing more and more severe storms during some of our prime collection times. 

This is one of the reasons it's good to spread our collection dates out over the year, rather than concentrate them all during the same couple months. It's also why our drop off locations have been more and more important. If severe weather impacts donors coming out on a specific date, then it's becoming more practical to have locations that can accept bikes any day of the week. The challenge there for us, is the loss of financial support that we typically get at collections as well as the interaction with the donors. What we gain is obviously the bikes...but also the value we can add to our volunteer warehouse sessions; this too, however, relies on financial support to keep gas in the tanks, the lights on, and those wrenches spinning.

But back to Evan.While working on his project he saw the work we were doing and appreciated some of our challenges. While we had a healthy supply of summer camps visiting the warehouse in June and July, that fell off a cliff in August. We were back to leaning on our individual volunteers to help us compact bikes, strip bikes for parts, pack them up, and load them into containers. In a month's time we loaded three containers and donated 1,500 bikes. Evan helped us meet that milestone. He joined us several times in the warehouse this summer to help compact bikes and even load one of the containers. He wasn't even looking to count volunteer hours, he just wanted to help.