The Rest of the Story... BBP's 2020 Holiday Kids Bike Giveaway.
On Wednesday, December 23rd, just a few days after our against-all-odds, remarkable Holiday Kids Bike Giveaway, I found myself driving down I-84 in a 26-foot UHaul filled with 100 bikes. Minutes before, I waved goodbye to BBP’s staff, their gloves still warming their hands from stuffing in the last bikes in 23-degree weather, their masks covering their smiling faces. There was a sense of accomplishment and relief in the air. As a team, we had just overcome perhaps the biggest challenge and obstacle in BBP’s history. As I chugged along down the interstate, 227 miles to Fort Hall Reservation in the heavily loaded truck, I felt very proud and very happy.
The ability to deliver those last 100 bikes was truly a gift to myself. Four hours of solo drive time to process a beyond-challenging year that ended with the pure, unencumbered beauty of BBP’s mission-in-action was exactly what I needed. I’m one of the few people with the privilege to witness the gift each person gives in making BBP possible, and as the miles passed, the countless faces of BBP’s supporters ran through my mind. More than anything, I found myself thinking about the words of a little girl named Braeelynn who received a bicycle at the Giveaway. At the end of an interview with a Channel 7 reporter, shortly after receiving her “dream bike,” Braeelynn was asked if there was anything else she wanted to share.
““Yes! Ummm, I would just like to say thank you to the whole world for giving me my new bike.”
The whole world? I kept asking myself as the mileposts passed by my window. Didn’t she know that the whole world tried to make that bike impossible...the entire giveaway impossible…every hour of every day of this last year impossible? Why did she say that? And why did my eyes fill with tears when she did?
On December 29, 2020, Braeelynn received a refurbished 20’’ pink, purple and black Kent “2 Cool” (make and model) bicycle. We customized it to her dream bike drawing with tassels on the handlebars, unicorn stickers, and pretty pink pedals. Months before, it was sitting in a pile of other bikes in an abandoned Pizza Hut, its tires rotted, pedals cracked, and not a mechanic in sight to get it rolling.
COVID-19 plagued the early efforts of this year’s bike giveaway with a global bike part shortage, difficult and limited working conditions for our staff and volunteers, and broken connections between our referring agencies and the kids we serve. But then...our staff transformed that abandoned Pizza Hut into a pop-up bicycle shop for a small, distanced, and dedicated group of volunteers—some giving over 100 hours of service in two months. Another volunteer took it upon himself to manage an adopt-a-bike program, enabling dozens of volunteers to pick up bikes from BBP and work on them from the safety of home. Then, we formed a partnership with the generous folks at Columbia Bank, who began paying local bike shops to fix the remaining 300 bikes needed for the Giveaway. Soon these bike shops were leveraging their own networks to collect the “impossible to find” bike parts needed to make our refurbished bikes as good as new.
The impossible was suddenly in our grasp, and all that was left was completely reinventing the Giveaway experience to run safely and meaningfully, as COVID-19 numbers continued to climb—and then hope the community had enough trust in us to show up to volunteer.
Most of the 502 kids who received bicycles on the 19th will never know the countless obstacles, moving pieces, and hundreds of dedicated people it took to make their dream bikes come true, and we prefer it that way. But, somehow, with her words and the way she sprinted from one end of the parking lot to the other, the fringe of her boots and handlebar tassels blowing in the wind and every volunteer pausing to watch, it seemed like Braeelynn knew exactly what it took. “The whole world.” And her broadly displayed love for that dream bike was her much greater gift back to us.
Soon I would arrive at Fort Hall Reservation to help celebrate a hundred more of our community's children with bicycles. “Celebrate” refers to our belief in the limitless potential of each child and their pedal-powered ability to create a brighter future for all us. If that’s not worth celebrating, what is? This would be my first time visiting Fort Hall. Usually their Tribal Youth Education Program picks up the bicycles from BBP, but, this year, they were on lockdown due to the pandemic. Fort Hall has been about the farthest reaching destination for our bikes for the last four years. BBP operates on the native land of the Shoshone Bannock and Shoshone Paiute people, and our outreach to Fort Hall and Duck Valley is our acknowledgement and appreciation of their continued connection to this land and our connection to them.
When I arrived at Fort Hall, the sun was shining but quickly falling toward the horizon. The wind bit through my jacket, making the 20-degree weather feel even colder as I knocked on the front door of the Tribal Youth Education Office. Because of the COVID-19 lockdown at Fort Hall Reservation, communication had been pretty tough, so I really didn’t know what to expect when the door opened, or what would transpire in the next 90 minutes.
What I remember most of the following minutes is warmth and movement. Warmth as the door opened, warmth in the voices and faces of the five women who welcomed me in, warmth in the willingness to help unload bikes in the frigid outside air, and warmth in the excitement for each bicycle being unloaded and the children they were already matching them to in their heads.
Soon the entire truck was unloaded, all 100 bikes leaning against the office building and the chain link fence extending off the back. Several of us were organizing them into piles based on size and color when suddenly Jessica James, the Program Director went facebook live.
“Come pick up a bike, this is for all community members… come pick up a bike.”
The first family arrived within 3 minutes, and the program workers went into action. Within 30 minutes, every last bike was gone. I helped put on a few pedals and adjusted some handlebars, but, for the most part, I just watched the movement unfold. One little girl hopped on to a bicycle almost identical to Braeelynn’s and pedaled fearlessly into the distance, her family following close behind in their Buick back to their home.
Pulling off a 500—bicycle Giveaway on top of every other obstacle we’d overcome in 2020 just shouldn’t have been possible. Yet, we (BBP’s staff, over 160 volunteers, and the community at-large) did it. And actually we did more. With the 81 bikes picked up by the Duck Valley Reservation Fire Department and the 100 just distributed to Fort Hall, BBP celebrated 706 kids provided with refurbished dream bikes during our 14th Holiday Bike Giveaway, a new record. In addition to 706 bikes, we sent home meals, warm clothing, and a feeling of hopeful brightness during a really dark time.
In total 1,138 kids received our bicycles in 2020, also a new record. And in 2020, our most difficult year, we gifted our 8000th bike to one of our beloved kids, completely unaware as we crossed that unbelievable threshold.
Over 8000 bicycles…that’s a scale hard to imagine, and I recommend that you don’t. In this story, I shared my own special moment and memory of two little girls that impacted me during this year’s Giveaway. What is truly special about BBP, and specifically our Holiday Kids Bike Giveaway, is that every volunteer and staff member has a different memory about a different moment when a different child filled them with hope. And at that moment, the number 8000 or any other number than 1 meant nothing.
This is the story of our 2020 Holiday Kids Bike Giveaway and the story of BBP in the best way I know how to tell it. It’s also a story that belongs to the entire community, because sometimes it takes the “whole world” coming together to get one little girl a bicycle.
