Featured Volunteer: Zachary

Mazel tov! This is Zachary and he really got the wheels rolling on our latest shipping streak. Zachary joined forces with us working on his Mitzvah project at Agudas Achim last month. He collected nearly 150 bikes that went into our container heading to Madagascar mid September, followed by Barbados and then Rwanda. Shipping not 1, not 2, but 3 weeks in a row! This brought our 2025 running tally of bikes donated to 10,000! This has us exceeding goals and expectations and on target to smash our yearly totals going back a decade!

But this isn't about us, it's about Zach! And as we stated, Zach is the one that got this fall stampede going. Zach was familiar with our work through his school Burgundy Farm Country Day School where we have partnered with the school going back to our first year in 2005....long before Zachary was born.

Zach reached out to us over the summer to start planning his project and then he worked alongside many adults to put all the parts of the bike drive together. He even worked directly with donors in advance of his collection and several of our longstanding partners to collect bikes from shops to increase the numbers at his event (and help us with transportation logistics).

Todd was nice enough to bring even more bikes the day of the event since we had such an amazing crew of volunteers assembled, but even without those added bikes Zachary still collected over 100 bikes that day. This is one of the biggest Mitzvah projects ever hosted for BfW! Out of the dozen or more projects we only found one in our history that was larger...and that was the super team of Sam and Noah back in 2018 when they collected 156 bikes at Temple Emanuel. And well, they were a team, of course it was bigger! Just for the record both of these projects had us scrambling for a Plan B on how to get all those bikes back to the warehouse. This time it was Zach's dad to the rescue, thank you very much for helping us transport all those bikes.

We could keep bragging about Zach, but we'll let him tell you about his experience...

My name is Zach and I am 13 years old. As a Jewish boy, I am responsible for doing a "Mitzvah" (charity) project as a part of my Bar Mitzvah preparation. I chose to host a bike drive for Bikes for the World. The experience of planning the drive was intense. It involved working with my synagogue to lock down a date and time, making a flyer, publicizing it online, posting flyers all around town, recruiting volunteers, and collecting bikes.

On the day of the event, we had over 20 volunteers preparing the nearly 150 bikes for shipping to Madagascar. I learned that the Bikes for the World program in Madagascar services the bikes to aid health workers. This means that the bikes donated in Alexandria will not only change the lives of the bike recipients but also the patients that they care for. This experience was so meaningful to me and Yvette and the Bikes for the World team were so great to work with.