Ambassadors & Advocates “Wheelie” Rally for a Cause—Bike Build for Los Osos Middle School!
Outride Ambassadors, Advocates, Mechanics, and Shop Owners all lend a hand wrenching on a Saturday Morning!
How do Bikes Build Communities? Start with a few mountain bike champions who also serve as Outride Athlete Ambassadors. Add a few dozen friends and volunteers. Bike Shop owners on board too. Art’s Cyclery owner Josh Job, Chris Mathis, Equipment Manager/Lead Mechanic with Clif Bar & Company Pro Team and local bike shop Foothill Cyclery, owner Josh Cohen donated four of his paid staff to help with the assembly.
What do you get? In a blink of an eye, 51 bikes built up and ready to deliver to the local Los Osos Middle School, in nearby San Luis Obispo. Known locally as SLO, but that wasn’t the pace this bike building team adopted on a weekend Saturday to fill the need to build up the bikes that were recently awarded to the school as part of the Outride Riding For Focus grant.
Los Osos Middle School is a high achieving school serving 600 students in grades six through eight in the Los Osos and Morro Bay communities. The school is recognized as one of California’s Schools to Watch-Taking Center Stage program that uses a competitive and rigorous review process to identify high-performing, high-impact middle schools to serve as models of real-world success.
The Los Osos Middle School PE Teacher Cole Nagler is beyond happy and excited to implement the program when things settle down post-COVID-19 to get students riding.
Just two Outride Ambassadors Christopher Blevins and Anders Johnson Hanging Out with their best friends—Bikes!
Christopher Blevins, Outride Athlete Ambassador and USA Cycling Elite Men's National Team Member, Tokyo 2020 Olympic Long Team Member motivated the bike builders to start at 9:00 a.m. and they added the final pedal to bike #51 at 2:32 p.m. Outride Ambassador Anders Johnson joined the call for action too as a local SLO resident and Cal Poly student following a pre-med track at Cal Poly State University. Anders races cross-country mountain biking and raced at Xterra World Championships last year.
“There’s always time to give back to kids”, shared Christopher. We hope our efforts scale-up more riding at a young age when children develop a passion for riding and life-time skills for not only navigating the challenges of hill climbs but challenges in life”.
Lance Haidet, rider for Legion of Los Angeles, Pro Cycling Team that’s dedicated to increasing diversity, encouraging inclusion, and giving supporters access to their favorite athletes also lives in SLO joined the party too! All in-- giving back to a sport they all love.
Asking for bike favors yields a strong turnout in San Luis Obispo, a city that was rated #1 last year for Best US City for Biking by PeopleforBikes, a national non-profit organization that promotes bicycling for transportation and recreation.
Outride Grant Program Manager, Lauren Freeman also joined the bike build effort and reached out to the advocacy community. A big shout out to Rick Ellison, Executive Director, Bike SLO County; Bike Kitchen Manager Dan Rezai Asl, and board member Gary Havas who stepped up to wrench too.
Link up the cycling community to Your Event
Here are some ideas to get you rolling!
Reach out to your bicycle friendly businesses in your city. Maybe a coffee shop or pizza place and see if they can support your effort or help volunteers. Who doesn’t love free pizza!
Ask your local bike shop if they can loan a mechanic for the day. In return, recognize their efforts by letting your local news or radio station know they are giving back and helping out. Your local station could even broadcast live from your venue for added publicity.
Safety First! Your local or regional bike coalition or local police officers working on traffic may want to be involved too as they are champions for safe roads to ride.
Take photos, (make sure you get a group shot!) and write a short recap of your success and thank everyone who joined to lend a hand. Send it to us at Outride too so we can write a blog post and share your success.