Bicycles for Humanity

I received this Email from Bicycles for Humanity last night. Please help out if you can. A bicycle that you dont want any more may completely change someone's life in Africa.

If you dont have a spare bike to give, but enjoy working on bikes as a hobby, perhaps you can contribute to fixing some before they go on the boat.

Greg

Hello,

I would like to introduce you to Bicycles for Humanity, one of Perth’s newest volunteer organisations, and being absolutely upfront, ask the Perth Mountain Bike Club to partner with us.

Quoting from our attached brochure: “Bicycles For Humanity International (B4H) is a world wide, grass roots, volunteer run organisation focused on simple, sustainable empowerment in the developing world”.

We do this by collecting pre-loved bikes here in Perth and sending them by the container load to our partners in Africa where they provide life changing mode of transport in rural communities. Our preference is for sturdy mountain/hybrid bikes - thin tyred, lightweight road bikes are not much value on the sand and gravel roads and tracks in Africa.

The Perth Chapter - B4H WA was formed earlier this year and its small band of enthusiastic (mostly retired) volunteers has made significant achievements – not least that we have already shipped our first container load of ~330 bikes to Namibia (see Update 25 September). Our aim is to grow our team and our capabilities to regularly ship 2 containers of bikes each year.

On the admin side we have registered our Incorporated Association, secured significant corporate Foundation Sponsorship, and shortly expect to receive a Charitable Collections Licence from the WA Govt.

To meet our aims we now need to broaden our reach in terms of collecting donated bikes and to expand our volunteer network. We are hoping that members of PMBC will find it in their hearts to mix their enjoyment of Mountain Bike riding with a little charitable effort to change lives in less fortunate parts of the world. Our volunteers not only assist with collection of donated bikes, but also participate in working bees to carry out repairs, preparation of the bikes for transport and finally packing as many as we can in a 40ft sea container.

For more info go to www.bicyclesforhumanity.com and browse the Perth pages, and also check out our Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bicycles-for-Humanity-WA/110414025722364

Our next major collection push is scheduled for Feb/March 2012, so we can ship another container in April.

We look forward to your positive response in due course.

Kind regards

David