Featured Volunteer: Logan Hay

Logan Hay set a Bikes for the World Eagle Project record last month when he collected 255 bikes for our program. He also raised over $1,000. So yeah, he's the featured volunteer of the month. How'd he do it? Well, we are still scratching our heads on that one. 

When Logan came to us last winter he had his sights set on completing his Eagle Project, one of the final steps in the long journey toward Eagle Rank. Like many scouts this involved a slew of emails back and forth between us and him. But Logan was quick to get the wheel turning, so to speak. He came out and met with our team at our first collection of the spring season just to get an idea of how to approach his project. 

For Logan, it wasn't a huge learning curve. He was familiar with bikes and more importantly he was familiar with us. Logan had even worked on a collection before helping his mom who teaches at Irving Middle School. Since Jenny took over that collection in 2016 their numbers just kept going up and up...so we had high expectations of Logan.

With his two biggest hurdles behind him, setting the date and getting the project approved, Logan went to work finding bikes. He decided he wasn't going to wait until May 4th to have the bikes come to him. He went out and found them. He approached the Bike Lane in Springfield and worked with them to take early donations that ended up at his house. 

Then we connected him with the Bike Stop all the way out in Warrenton, Virginia. Remember that guy who used to pick up bikes for us and set the high handlebar for loading containers? Well Bob is still involved with the program by collecting bikes at his shop throughout the year. And he worked with Logan to get him that trailer load of bikes in the photo above. 

When we checked in with Logan a few weeks before the collection we found out he already had over 100 bikes! Yikes! We were concerned that he had stacks of bikes in his yard sitting out in the rain getting rusty...and there were still weeks to go. We asked him to consider putting a tarp on them. Jenny got back to us by sharing this photo of her house- inside her house. No worries, the bikes are dry. Poor mom went away for the weekend and guys took over Hay House.

So anyway, we expected great things of Logan, but he more than surpassed our goal, he shattered it! He met it, doubled it, tripled it, then added another 30 bikes! To put that all in perspective, our next container of bikes was loaded four days later and held 400 bikes. Logan collected more than half of those bikes. And if each bike donated helps improve four lives, Logan just changed the lives of over 1,000 people!

Looking back over the years, Bikes for the World has worked on 96 Eagle projects. Collectively the scouts have donated 8,000 bikes to our partners around the world. Of those nearly 100 projects eight scouts have collected over 150 bikes, double our recommended goal for an Eagle project. Two eked past 200. One has topped 250 bikes: Logan Hay.