initiative Archives - Page 2 of 9

14/11/202015/01/2021

LYP November Bike Drive – Adelaide AU

To the Aussie readers: Happy National Recycling Week (8th – 14th Nov 2020).

Do you live in Adelaide, have a spare bike and are looking for a way to support the NRW theme of ‘Recovery – A future beyond a bin’?

Then this post is for you!

..And if you live elsewhere.. look for a similar program in your area!

Here’s a sneak peek at Lighthouse Youth Program’s November Bike Drive 2020.

LYP November Bike Drive - Adelaide AU. Bicycles Create Change.com 14th November 2020.

What is Lighthouse Youth Projects (LYP)?

Lighthouse Youth Projects Inc (LYP) was established in Adelaide, South Australia in 2016. This program delivers a range of bike programs – including BMX and MTB mentoring programs to give hope to young Australians in crippling emotional, mental and financial situations.

Lighthouse Youth Projects Inc is a registered charity and volunteer supported not-for-profit organisation sharing a love of riding and living life to the fullest. LYP strives to help young people at risk of not being amazing, empowering them for a successful future.

They work with young people, regardless of circumstance, supporting them into positive pathways through our diverse range of programs.

Their services include a range of community and social events, bike skill coaching and events, and life skills and mentoring.

Click here for more about LYP.

LYP Bike Drive

Do you want to help improve the lives of young people AND support the environment at the same time?

To mark Australia’s National Recycling Week LYP is teaming up with the City of Port Adelaide Enfield and the City of Charles Sturt to take your pre-loved bikes off your hands.

LYP welcomes old (or new!) bikes that need a new home, and we are excited to get them back on the road or recycle them when they are past their used by date!

Rescuing bikes from sheds, backyards, and garages allows LYP to continue to provide their mentoring and help at-risk youth to create positive change in their lives.

Join LYP at the Beverley Recycling and Waste Centre, 2-6 Toogood Ave, Beverley, South Australia this Friday 13 & Saturday 14 November 2020!

LYP can’t wait to see you there!

BIKE DROP OFF TIMES:
Friday 13th between 8am – 4pm
Saturday 14th between 8am – 4pm

So if you are around Adelaide and have a spare bike, why not head down and meet the LYP crew and support their Nov 2020 Bike Drive.

LYP Mentoring through bikes

Not only do Lighthouse Youth Projects offer a range of community events, BMX and MTB coaching, along with life skills mentoring, but they also have a range of videos online to encourage more people to get on their bikes and ride.

Mentoring through bikes

These videos cover a rage of skills, from how to bunny hop, to ‘pumping’ for when you are on a pump track and some general bike maintenance skills (like the video below).

This is another way LYP help to mentors others and share a love of bikes, riding skills, energy and enthusiasm with the next generation, encouraging everyone around them to get stoked on life.

Impressive!

Keep up the awesome work LYP!

Some content and all images and video sourced from LYP website, Vimeo, FB & IG.

25/07/202027/08/2020

Bicycles help the Pascua Yaqui community fight diabetes

I am always looking for stories where bicycles create positive community change. Inclusive bike-focused programs that support First Nations and minority groups is a special interest for this blog.

Previously, I have posted on programs that increase bike use, access and participation for Indigenous Australians such as:

This week, I came across a US community-based project working at the forefront of 3 critical intersecting issues: diabetes, first nations (Native American community) health and using bicycling to mitigate chronic health issues.

This project works with the Pascua Yaqui people in the US. Obesity and diabetes is a major individual and community health issue in many communities – and the Diabetes Community Empowerment Project is using bicycles to help address this issue. What an awesome project!

Who are they?

This initiative is part of Native Exercise Empowerment Project.

Since 2012, the Diabetes Community Empowerment Project has been working with the Native American community helping them move towards better health. This community sees a high incidence of diabetes and obesity and DCEP empower native people to exercise more and be role models for each other.

The programs work in resource poor communities by removing the barriers between people and the healthier, happier versions of themselves.

Starting out

The project began when James Stout (DCEP Executive Director) was training in Tucson Arizona. At the time, he was making a living as a cyclist. Having spent time riding through the reservation and working with nonprofit outside of the US, he noticed the high rate of diabetes among Native American people and wondered if there was anything he could do to help.

As someone who lives with diabetes, James was motivated to share the joy, and health, he found in riding his bike. Taking a clapped out station wagon and as many old bikes and helmets, as it could fit, James took time out from his PhD I began to work on the reservation in order to better understand the barriers between Native people and better diabetes management.

Although access to medication is an issue in many Native American communities, a lack of access to exercise and education is often equally dangerous. Through working with the healthcare team on the reservation, the program engages people with diabetes and encouraged them to try cycling with the goal of completing a El Tour de Tucson event.

3 years after it started, each of the initial riders have returned to serve as a mentor and bought friends and family with them. By 2016 the project has seen over 100 participants finished their goal event, thousands of pounds have been lost and blood glucose management has seen drastic improvement.

DCEP Mission

To research and implement peer mentored, exercise based lifestyle interventions in resource poor diabetes communities. Focusing on goal events, we aim to use community based education and exercise programs to empower people to live healthier and happier lives as well as to be changemakers in their own communities.

Moving forward

The DCEP website has not been updated in a while, so I hope this project is still ongoing! Even if it is not, the project is a great example of an how bicycles can be used to improve indiviviual and community health and well-being.

It also serves as a reminder that we need a broader, more inclusive methods of providing specialist, community-focused responses to support the needs of First Nations communities and minority groups.

All images and some content of this post sourced from DCEP.

08/06/202001/06/2021

New Materialisms SIG: Vulcana Circus – Stronghold

New Materialism SIG: Vulcana Women’s Circus - Stronghold. Bicycles Create Change.com 8th June 2020. — Image: Vulcana Circus

Along with Dr Sherilyn Lennon, I co-convene Griffith University’s New Materialism Special Interest Group (SIG). New Materialisms (NM) is an emerging post-qualitative research approach that has a significant take up in education, queer and gender studies, environmental science and arts-based disciplines in particular, but is gaining traction more widely as well.

The aim of this SIG is to provide a supportive space for GIER students, ECRs, mid-career and more senior Academics to explore, discuss, experiment and share complex and emerging post-qualitative ideas, methods and approaches.

Our SIG meets once a month and we have over 30 members Australia-wide. For the first 2020 session, I presented some of my African bicycle fieldwork. But then COVID-19 lockdown happened, so we had a month break. This is our first session back – and we were all delighted to be back in action again!

For this session, we discussed 3 papers and one of the most essential questions plaguing NM What is ‘new’ about New Materialisms? and then had a presentation by Dr Natalie Lazaroo (Griffith Uni, Theatre Studies).

The Readings

The first two papers (Monforte, 2018; Banerjee & Blaise, 2013) are advocating for NM as a new way of thinking about research and the other one is pushing back saying it’s all been done before and there is nothing new to see here (Petersen, 2018).

For this SIG we had 3 readings

Monforte, J. (2018). What is new in new materialism for a newcomer? Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 10(3), 378-390.
Banerjee, B., & Blaise, M. (2013). There’s something in the air: Becoming-with research practices. Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies, 13(4), 240-245. doi:10.1177/1532708613487867
Petersen, E. B. (2018). ‘Data found us’: A critique of some new materialist tropes in educational research. Research in Education, 101(1), 5-16. doi:10.1177/0034523718792161

In the session, we provide a spectrum: on one end ‘nothing new’ and on the other end ‘everything is new’

We invited participants to take a position on this spectrum and be ready to justify your answer/position. People could positions themselves into a any camp. And once people had contributed their ideas to the spectrum, we talked about the positions and the reasons why we had taken that stance. We used the readings to inform our opinions, ideas from elsewhere/other scholars, experience and other ideas to help explain why we chose that point and to better understand where other people were currently positioned.

The aim of this discussion was to plumb what’s new about NM and see what makes sense to the group.

Following this discussion, we had a presentation from Dr Natalie Lazaroo.

Dr Natalie Lazaroo – Vulcana Circus: Stronghold

In this session, Dr Lazaroo returned to her PhD work (two years ago) to untangle the mess to make new discoveries. She reflected on her early methodology and locates a poem titles ‘Expressions of longing’ which she wrote in response to NM SIG provocations.

This return poem captures the essence of articulations that emerged during her artistic collaboration over a 4-month period of fieldwork with Vulcana Women’s Circus to create a community performance called Stronghold, which involved people with disabilities.

Natalie’s presentation was a real highlight – hearing about her work and research highlighted many NM tensions and opportunities. The group was blown away when she shared her poem which was evocative, agential and very moving. The conversation that followed was interesting, insightful and unexpected.

We all left this session deep in thought about these NM approaches might relate to our own work and in awe of the amazing work Natalie and Vulcana does.

I can’t wait to see more from both!

Stronghold

Stonghold was a project run in conjunction with Horizons Respite and Vulcana Women’s Circus. This partnership 16-week workshop program culminated with a final performance called Stronghold which engaged 10 Access Arts members. During this project, participants had the opportunity to learn skills puppetry, performance, circus and theatre. Stronghold was performed as part of Access Arts 30th Anniversary celebration at Brisbane Powerhouse.

Vulcana

Vulcana is a Brisbane-based circus that was established in 1995 to counter a major discrepancy between women’ and men’s experience of circus, both in training and in the expectation of how and what they perform. Vulcana now welcomes women, trans and non-binary gendered adults, kids and teens of all genders, to its inclusive circus training, performance making projects, and community engagement programs. It is an incubator for new, emerging and professional artists who have developed their passion as practitioners, performers and teachers in this art form that offers everybody a place to explore their uniqueness and their creativity.  Vulcana respects diversity and the feminist principles of equity and inclusion which are central to all our work and the starting point for engagement with students, participants, communities and artists.

15/05/202013/07/2020

Bike-Pack Rubbish Out! Epic US bike trip to pick up trash.

Bike-Pack Rubbish Out! Leave it Better: Epic US bike trip to pick up trash. Bicycles Create Change.com 15th May 2020.

2 Friends, 4,700 miles, 1 mission: Pick up trash!

On U.S. roads there are 6,000 pieces of litter per mile, on average.

Seth Orme and Abby Taylor set out on their bikes for an epic five-month, 4,700 mile trip across the US – during which they cleaned up 2,130 pounds of trash.

Their journey has been documented in the REI film Leave it Better.

(Below is the trailer. Link to the full 20-minute film for free at end of this post).

Background

One of the main seven tenets of Leave No Trace outdoor ethics is to leave it as you found it. Generally, this is a common-sense approach to preserve the natural or historical beauty of private or public land; it should look untouched when you leave it.

But why not leave it better? In 2015 Seth Orme started a project he calls, Packing It Out, a continuous mission to leave the places he and his companions visit not just as they found them, but better.

For the first-ever Packing It Out trip in 2015, Seth thru–hiked the Appalachian Trail (AT) alongside his friends Joe Dehnert and Paul Twedt. Over 2,200 miles, they packed out 1,100 pounds of trash that was found along the trail.

The following year, Seth and Paul continued the project by hiking a grand total of 2,650 miles from the border of Mexico to Canada along the Pacific Crest Trail. On this trip they cleaned up 720 pounds of trash en route.

This year, Seth traded his hiking boots for a bike and recruited his friend Abby Taylor. On April 26, 2017, Seth and Abby set out on a cross-country bike tour to pick up trash along the way.

Epic US bike trip to pick up trash.

Their route took them from Georgia to Washington State, including a circuit of stops at National Forests, scenic areas, campgrounds, etc., hosting trash cleanups and conservation-theme clinics as they rode.

For 5 months, their goal was to explore the country, meet people, spread the word on ‘Packing It Out,’ and continue their message of environmental stewardship.

At each destination, whether alone or with a group, Orme and Taylor cleaned up trash, totaling more than 2,100 pounds over the course of the trip.

What a fantastic trip and a timely challenge to all riders (and people).

I know I have been stopping more often to pick up rubbish on my bike rides. I hope people, both ON and OFF continue picking rubbish and progressing conversations about sustainability, plastic pollution and conversation.

Happy clean bike rides all!

Images, video and content sourced from Wild Confluence YouTube and an article by Logan Watts for Bike Packing.com

26/03/202029/05/2020

Pedal4PNG Bike Ride

Pedal4PNG. Bicycles Create Change.com 26th March 2020.

While looking at some pacific community bike projects, I came across the Pedal4PNG Bike Ride.

It sparked my interest as it was relatively small and specific and offered a unique riding opportunity through Papua New Guinea. It also provides some ideas for other organisations (like Village Bicycle Project in Lunsar, Sierra Leone who I have just returned home from) might consider as a way to increase exposure, contacts and fundraising.

Pedal4PNG Bike Ride

The Pedal4PNG Bike Ride was a 6-day event held in 2018 and run by Australian Doctors International (ADI) to raise funds for PNG‘s Healthy Mums and Healthy Babies programs.

ADI provide support in PNG which is only five km north of Queensland. But unlike Aussie kids, 6% of Papuan children won’t live to reach the age of five. ADI explain this in simple terms: for every soccer team of kids, that’s one not making it as far as kindy age.

Children die in PNG every day from preventable diseases such as diarrhoea, measles and pneumonia. Meanwhile, their mothers face a mortality rate of 250 mums per 100,000 live births, with under 50% of births medically supervised.

Proceeds of the ADI Pedal4PNG Bike Ride went to supporting the critical work Australian Doctors International carries out in PNG to provide better health outcomes for young children and mums.

Currently, ADI is working on the frontline with local authorities on a COVID-19 PNG taskforce.

ADI Integrated Health Patrols

Australian Doctors International has a unique model: conducting monthly patrols to rural and remote areas, where healthcare is generally inaccessible.

This is locally sustainable health care in action – prevention and treatment in the isolated communities where over 85% of the PNG population lives.

ADI teams provide a mix of skills and staff to deliver hands-on health care and save lives.

ADI doctors deliver clinical capacity building for front line PNG health workers to improve health service delivery in the areas of child and maternal health, malaria, TB and lifestyle diseases.

The Bike Trip

This bike trip was from Namatanai (in the north) down to Kavieng (in the South) covering a total of 260kms on roads throughout the New Ireland Province.

The trip was advertised as a ‘bike adventure’ and given the tropical heat (30C +) and physical challenge of riding through some varied terrain including some hills and it was best the riders knew about the conditions. But the riding was mostly on sealed roads, so the actual surface was not that difficult. There were a couple of longer days (up to 100 km), so doing some training was advised.

As with any international in-country charity bike ride, built into the itinerary was time for cultural events, meeting locals, time to explore local surrounds, have R&R and opportunities to surf, relax and visit some handi/craftsmiths.

This ride had a few other perks I hadn’t seen before, particular to only PNG of course, which was the option to go and watch chocolate making at Rubios as well as do some local scuba diving and fishing and explore the WWII sites and history along the island.

What I appreciated is that the trip number was capped at ten which is a good number for an adventure ride – enough to have some diversity in personalities, but not too much that the group is so large that it takes hours to get ready or do anything.

Trip Details

Sunday 13 May: arrive in Kavieng, welcome dinner and overnight at Nusa Island Retreat
Monday 14 May: transit to Namatanai, with visits to several different health clinics, afternoon visit to hospitals, unpacking of bikes and overnight at Namatanai Lodge
Tuesday 15 May: ride to Rubio’s (40km)
Wednesday 16 May: plantation tour, chocolate making, ride 110km to Fissoa
Thursday 17 May: 100km ride into Kavieng, visit giant eels, final dinner Nusa Island Retreat
Friday 18 May: depart (although we recommend staying the weekend for some diving!)

Along the way, riders stopped to visit healthcare clinics and hospitals that were supported by ADI, so they got to see first-hand some of the health issues and programs that were underway to meet the needs of locals.

Overall is looks like a great adventure ride to do. What appeals to me most is the small group number and how riders can go and visit clinics to better appreciate local health issues. ADI noted in their Annual Report 2018 that the ride had been a success.

It might take a lot of work to organise and I know these rides are not for everyone, but it is good to some diversity in charity bike ride offerings beyond the (dare I say ‘stale’) mass rides for cancer research events.

Best of luck ADI!

All images courtesy of ADI.

07/01/202010/02/2020

Bike Works at Kunnanurra WA

This blog has looked at a number of programs that increase bike use, access and participation for indigenous Australians, such as:

In this post, we look at one of Bikes 4 Life programs that connects with local deadly youths living in a remote community to a range of other health services by improving bike participation.

Bikes 4 Life is an international non-government organisation that supplies bicycles all over the world to improve education access, health outcomes and income generation.

One of Bikes 4 Life’s programs operates in a remote Western Australia community in conjunction with the local organisation East Kimberley Job Pathways (EKJP).

East Kimberley Job Pathways is located in the far north of Western Australia in the isolated community of Kunnunurra. EKJP is a ‘for purpose’ Aboriginal Corporation with the primary purpose of delivering the Australian Government’s Community Development Programme across the broader East Kimberley Region of Western Australia.

In 2019, the EKJP team ran a bike rescue program called BikeWorks. The Bike Works program underpins a social and emotional wellbeing program that EKJP runs for local youths. This program teaches youths how to refurbish and maintain donated bicycles sourced through Bikes 4 Life. Read more about the program here.

The bikes used for the program are all recreational bikes (no roadies) because more robust bikes are better suited to the remote Western Australian terrain and climate.

The Bike Works program outcomes are:

Increased social and emotional wellbeing
Teamwork and networks
Building new relationships
Improved attendance at school (and/or other education pathways)
Raised aspirations of future pathways
Connection and contribution to community
Employment opportunities (within the Bike Program and with other employers)

The program was very successful. After a great start in 2019, and with increasing demands for bikes in the community, Bikes 4 Life is will continue sending bikes and supporting EKJP so this program can keep progressing.

Parts of this post are sourced from Bikes 4 Life Projects web page.

24/12/201912/01/2020

Lismore’s Bicycle Christmas Tree

Christmas is only moments away.

For previous Christmases, this blog has looked at:

For 2019, we are heading to Lismore in QLD, where for the past few years the local City Council has provided a public recycled art Christmas Tree. This very successful initiative all started with recycled bikes.

The Lismore Council public art Christmas tree initiative stemmed after the local ‘leaning tree’ that had previously been decorated for Christmases was (unduly and harshly) dubbed ‘the world’s most pathetic’ Christmas tree. (Note: Personally, I think the leaning tree was awesome. Such a pity that we don’t celebrate diversity and difference and the wonderful uniqueness in nature. As Gaudi stated ‘there are no straight lines in nature’ – I think it is the very twists, turns, messiness and curves that makes life so engaging and grand. The very thing that made that tree unique and special to some, others considered to be a flawed and an eyesore. I don’t agree that ‘perfection’ i.e. a straight tree (or a or a ‘pretty blonde female’ as an extrapolation) is necessarily beautiful. Perhaps we need to check in with our cultural value criteria – anyhow..back to Lismore).

So, in 2015, Lismore Council looked to change their tree and started a recycled public art initative.

Lismore’s Bicycle Christmas Trees

The recycled bicycle tree was the first of these instalments. In 2015, the Lismore Bike Christmas Tree was erected as a centrepiece for the main roundabout on the corner of Keen and Magellan Streets.

This intuitive is to celebrate the festive holiday season as well as Lismore’s commitment to recycling and sustainability.

A local bike shop, Revolve, supplied the 90 old bicycles (which otherwise would have gone to scrap), 50 litres of paint, almost half a tonne of steel for the frame and $30 of donated rainbow mis-tints from the local paint shop. GOLD!

Lismore’s council metal workshop welded the bicycle frames were welded onto the steel frame they had created as the base structure.

The final ‘tree’ was then painted in rainbow mis-tint colours by the council staff and their families in their own time.

The tree was then gifted by the council to Lismore residents.

Previous Lismore Recycled Art Christmas Tree

The Lismore Council Public Recycled Art Christmas Tree has had a number of reiterations since its first recycled bike tree.

Lismore’s tree for Christmas 2019 was a 7-metre ‘living’, growing structure. It has more than 300 potted plants, 100 metres of tinsel, 250 metres of solar-powered LEDs, 16 pairs of work trousers and matching boots. At the top instead of a star, council staff made a Planta (plant ‘Santa’).

The 2018 Lismore Christmas tree was made out discarded umbrellas.

In 2017 it was recycled road signs.

In 2016 it was recycled car tyres.

The 2015 Bicycle Christmas Tree has been the most popular instalment by far to date. In acknowledgement of this, the council is in discussion for a possible future tree that has sculptural bikes that produce power so that when visitors ride them, the generated power will light up the tree. Sounds similar to Brisbane’s Bicycle-powered Christmas Tree.

A big round of applause for Lismore Council for installing the recycled bike Christmas tree. An inspiring public project that brings community and council together to celebrate sustainability, recycling, community and creativity.

Here’s to more bicycle-inspired Christmas trees!

Happy holidays and safe riding all!

22/11/201925/11/2019

Global Childhood Juxtapositions: World Children’s Day 2019

Regular readers of this blog know that my PhD research explores how bicycles feature in rural African girls’ access to education. This means mobility, education, in/equity, gender justice and children’s rights are central to much of the work I do. They are also reoccurring themes for this blog. I regularly post articles that showcase how bicycles create more positive social, environmental and educational change for all – and in many cases for children specifically.

A few previous BCC posts that feature bikes and kids are:

Bicycle Washing Machine (15 Nov 2015)
Do education levels effect cycling rates? (18 Nov 2015)
Bihar – Girls’ Bicycles Education Scheme (26 Feb 2016)
Japan: Bicycles that expand children’s potential in Cambodia (20 Apr 2016)
Indigenous Youth Olympic Track Cyclists (4 June 2017)
Let your kids Ride2School – then go to jail! (17 Mar 2017)
Jakarta slums alive with fold-out bikes (8 Sept 2018)
The Orange Bike project in the Philippines (27 Jan 2019)
1,300 South Sudanese girls to get bicycles to access education (20 Aug 2019)

November 20^th is the World Children’s Day.

This year, I wanted to acknowledge this date in a different way.

Instead of sharing a project where children benefit from bikes, I wanted to highlight the juxtapositions of cultural experiences of children around the world.

Expand your cultural competency

This week in my Griffith Uni 1205MED Health Challenges for the 21^st Century class, we discussed cultural competency and cultural safety. I challenged my students to set themselves a cultural competency experiment/activity for homework – something that they needed to do that would push them outside their own cultural box.

It is too easy for us to think that our experience of life is how it is everywhere.

In Western countries, we are very privileged and sheltered. The experiences of being a child in Australia, the US, Europe, Scandinavia or the UK is vastly different than those in less advantaged countries.

To more broadly consider how culture and environment impact children’s lives differently, look no further than artist Uğur Gallenkuş (@ugrgallen) – his work does this uncompromisingly.

Global Childhood Juxtapositions: The work of Uğur Gallenkuş.

To honour 2019 World Children’s Day, I’m sharing some of Turkish artist Uğur Gallenkuş work. Uğur is a digital artist who collages images to highlight binaries, juxtapositions and contrasts in human experience. His work comments on conflicts, political issues and social disparities. Some pieces can be quite confronting, others heartfelt, but all have a clear message and are thought-providing.

Uğur’s work forces us to rethink our privilege and remind us that we need to think, feel and act beyond our own immediate cultural experience.

And that many children worldwide need a voice, recognition and help.

Volunteers help a refugee man and baby as refugees hoping to cross into Europe, arrive on the shore of Greece‘s Lesbos Island after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey on November, 2015. Image: @ugurgallen. Photo: Özge Elif Kızıl @oekizil @anadoluajansi

See more of Uğur’s work on Instagram -it is well worth checking out.

All images are created by Uğur Gallenkuş.

12/10/201922/10/2019

Check your overseas bike tour adheres to Eco-bike tourism principles

Going overseas for a bike tour is a great way to get around, see local sites and keep fit and active.

Increasingly, cyclists are either taking their bikes away with them or are signing up for a localised one or multi-day biking adventure such as ‘bike and cook‘ trips or ‘winery bike tours‘.

If you are planning to book a bike tour overseas, a key consideration should be to check whether the bike tour is officially registered as an Eco-tourism provider.

There is a massive social, economic and environmetal impact difference between bike tours that are Eco-tourist registered, and those who are not.

Much like Fair Trade is for consumer products, Eco-tourism is guided by a set of international standards and principles that operators must abide by in order to be able to identify as Eco-tourism. Registration is run under the auspice of The International Ecotourism Society (TIES).

Eco-Bike Tourism Principles

A good example of an Eco-bike tourism business, is Storyteller Eco-bike Tours in the Cook Islands.

For Storyteller, Eco-tourism is about uniting conservation, communities, and sustainable travel. This means that those who implement and participate in ecotourism activities should adhere to ecotourism principles.

Ecotourism Principles

•    Minimise impact.
•    Build environmental and cultural awareness and respect.
•    Provide positive experiences for both visitors and hosts.
•    Provide direct financial benefits for conservation.
•    Provide financial benefits and empowerment for local people.
•    Raise sensitivity to host countries’ political, environmental, and social climate.

Cook Islands: Storytellers Eco-bike Tours

Storytellers stand by the principles of Ecotourism. They are the only Cook Islands Eco Tour on mountain bikes.

Storytellers give 10% of profits back to the community for development projects.

Their local storytellers (staff) are passionate and knowledgeable about the local culture, history and environment and love sharing stories of their heritage with guests.

So next time you look at a bike tour overseas, check to see if they are registered as a Eco-tourism operator – this will boost your enjoyment of the tour and help support local communities.

*The International Ecotourism Society (TIES).

07/08/201910/08/2019

Cycle Farm

Increasingly, more people are turning to alternative ways of eating, living and consuming that are more sustainable and enriching.

Cycling has always been part of the green revolution, but one pair of farmers are taking this approach to the next level.

Cycle Farm is an organic farm run by Patricia Jenkins and Jeremy Smith located in Spearfish South Dakota, USA.

As their name suggests – as well as being a functional organic farm, Cycle Farm is particularly interested in using bicycles to facilitate workload and productivity.

They are a working farm, selling their produce to a variety of outlets and farmers markets, as well as being a kind of open/farm visitation/awareness-raising platform for more sustainable farming/consumption practices.

Bicycles are central to Cycle Farm’s philosophy and daily operations.

Most impressive is how Patricia and Jeremy have custom-altered a range of bicycles and integrated their use into all areas of farm operations, like the bike-powered roller-crimper – very inspiring!

Cycle Farm has a blog and website showcasing some great photos and info on what they are up to and seasonal activities.

Here’s how Cycle Farm explain how they use bicycles:

Here at Cycle Farm, we are very enthusiastic about bicycles as efficient farm tools. We’re using bicycles to help minimize our off-farm inputs. Employing bicycle- and human-power and minimizing our off-farm inputs is important to us for the following reasons.

Conventional agriculture has a huge environmental impact, from the use of pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizers, distributing produce to distant markets, use of heavy machinery, water use and pollution, etc. For us, reducing our inputs forces us to look at our overall ecological impact. For example, we are a human-powered, bicycle-driven operation. We take our vegetables to market each week by bicycle and encourage CSA members to ride their bike to the farm for pick-up.

We are producing local food. Our goal is not to grow food for a large wholesale market, but to serve the community in which we live, Spearfish Valley. Additionally, we are not using a tractor, but instead all farm work is done by hand. This means we don’t have to use gasoline, which saves us money as well as reduces our carbon emissions.

A second reason is economic; the more we can reduce the amount of things we have to purchase to run this farm, the more likely we can make a living wage off these three acres. A tractor, even a small one, is a considerable expense. If we can do the same work with our hands and with a bicycle, we can save ourselves and our market that additional cost.

Beyond reducing gas use and our carbon emissions, we are working toward building soil carbon in our fields with small scale, no-till vegetable farming. Organic no-till methods are becoming more and more widespread in larger operations for a variety of reasons (soil conservation, carbon sequestration, nutrient cycling, etc.). However, this has not yet translated into small scale vegetable production, that we’ve found. We are experimenting with and developing methods applicable for a smaller scale (0-15 acre) organic, no-till operation (i.e. bike-powered roller-crimper).

And of course, bicycles make everything more fun. By moving at a more human pace, we are getting to know our community better. We can stop and talk with friends and neighbors in passing. Hopping on a bike allows us to stay loose and flexible after long days in the field. And there is something so satisfying about hitting a pocket of cool air on a ride past Spearfish Creek on a warm summer evening.

However, doing this alone ultimately may not accomplish much towards addressing pressing global crises. We are enthusiastic about helping to motivate our community and participating in an exchange of ideas on a broader scale. Interested in human-powered, sustainable agriculture – then you can come visit the farm and talk to us.

Lastly, when the farm slows down in the winter, we plan on gearing up a bicycle workshop in the garage. Building custom cargo and utilitarian bicycles and trailers, as well as doing frame repair.