Volunteer Rally: The Primary Health Bike Drive is Coming Up!

On Saturday, September 21, Primary Health will host the 3rd annual bike donation drive benefitting BBP. This event is a huge endeavor, and it’s arguably one of the most important volunteer based events of the year for BBP. It’s actually the only way we have enough bikes for the annual Holiday Kids Bike Giveaway.

The bicycles donated on this day are the foundation for our Holiday Kids Bike Giveaway and our refurbished bicycle program of the rest of this year and well into next year. This bike drive transforms our giving potential, and we’re so grateful that Primary Health is back at it for a 3rd year.

Primary Health has 18 locations spanning the Treasure Valley in Boise, Meridian, Eagle, Caldwell and Nampa. If you're familiar with our donations program, you know that BBP is unable to pick up donations. This means that there are potentially hundreds of bicycles in the valley waiting to be given new life; and their owners simply aren’t able to get them to us.

On September 21, each and every Primary Health location will be accepting donations between 10 AM and 2 PM.

Here’s what happens:

Community members bring their bicycle donations to Primary Health locations during the designated donation hours, and trucks and trailers circle the valley picking up donations. Full trucks and trailers head to BBP Home Base to drop of donations, and then they get back on the road and back to Primary Health locations. This process continues until all donated bicycles have been picked up and then dropped off at BBP.

We expect to see between 700 to 1000 bicycle donations on this day. Having an efficient process in place will allows us to get the most amount of bicycles in the quickest amount of time back to BBP. Primary Health team members generously give their time to staff each location, but they can’t accomplish this feat alone. This means we need volunteers. And lots of ‘em.

Last year, we stationed a whole bunch of volunteers down at BBP and had them flatten (remove pedals and turn handlebars) bikes for efficient storage. Helpful as this endeavor was, we weren’t as efficient as we could have been, because

1) we weren’t able to get as many bikes loaded into the trucks because unflattened bikes take up way more room than flattened ones, and

2) oftentimes, trucks arrived at BBP at the same time, putting a lot of pressure on volunteers to do the most amount of work in the shortest amount of time.

Our big goal for this year is to flatten the bicycles before they leave the Primary Health locations. This means that we need to mobilize a large crew of volunteers who are willing to be assigned to specific Primary Health locations for the day. We need 5 volunteers for high volume donation locations and 2 to 3 volunteers for lower volume spots.

It’s probably not a surprise that many of the high volume donation spots are located in Caldwell and Nampa, because these are the furthest locations from BBP. So we really really need volunteers who are willing and able to serve those locations.

How can you help?

Find a group of friends and sign up to cover a location. You are able to sign up by specific location, so if you have 2 to 4 friends, each of you can sign up for the same spot.

Know an organization or small or large business looking to put in some volunteer time this fall? Send them this article and ask them to sign up.

We still need volunteers down at BBP, so there are definitely opportunities for the day in the downtown Boise area as well.

We’ll make sure you have plenty of clear instruction on what you’re doing the day of the drive. We also want to acknowledge that this is a longer volunteer day (6 hour shifts) with a bit of elbow grease needed. So we’ll be throwing a big ol’ volunteer pizza party back at BBP when the drive is over.

I’ll be pushing hard for help with this event throughout the next month; and I’ll also be sharing more about why it’s important to us and why Primary Health is so great. So stay tuned for future newsletter stories about the drive and our partnership with Primary Health.

But before then, head on over to our volunteer page and sign up for a shift!

Thank you and ride on! -Em