Featured Volunteer: Keith Whitaker

Collecting bikes in South Carolina

Summer 2012. "I live in Charleston, SC and am interested in helping out." It was a simply stated, common email that came into Bikes for the World about two years ago. We had no idea then, how serious Keith Whitaker was.

Keith is the marketing director at Gildan's Branded Apparel Division headquarters in Charleston, South Carolina. He heard about Bikes for the World and he wanted to get involved. But he also had a vision: he wanted to take advantage of the containers his company was sending back to their operation in Honduras. Let's fill them with bikes!

This was no ordinary volunteer fulfilling community service hours. Keith was in a position to expand our vision to create Bikes for the World 'chapters' outside the DC area. Bikes for the World was about to pop up in South Carolina. We were stoked!

Fast forward a year. Summer 2013. Coordinating an effort at a distance between a corporation and a new non-profit partner overseas doesn't happen overnight. While BfW Director Keith Oberg was working out the details with the potential partner, Fundacion Adelante, Gildan's Director of Marketing Keith Whitaker was speaking with the company's CEO.

Finally, everyone came to an agreement. Keith Whitaker would host several bike collections in the community, collect bikes and store them at Gildan. Adelante agreed to take an initial shipment of 100 bikes to get a feel for how the program would work.

First BfW container loading in SC

So Whitaker recruited the help from fellow co-workers Sarah Stafford and Chuck Jones to help advertise the collections, prep the bikes, and ultimately load the container themselves, right there in South Carolina. To supplement the shipment Keith Oberg arranged to have bikes collected earlier in 2013 at Reagan High School in NC transported to Gildan in SC. In fact, Whitaker also coordinated the effort to pick up and deliver these bikes to Gildan's warehouse in SC.

Fast forward one more year. Summer 2014. Adelante recently reported back to Bikes for the World on the how the program was going. Our donated bikes were received in February 2014. They were then refurbished so that they could be sold at a low cost to rural Hondurans in need of affordable transportation to get to work and school.

Jose Matute, bike mechanic and shop owner

Jose Matute, a local bicycle shop owner, was responsible for getting the donated bikes back in working order. His bike business is booming by supplying parts to the new bike owners as well as continuing further maintenance on the bikes.

Profits from the bike program are helping to fund a new initiative Adelante is currently establishing, the Secondary Education Loan. This loan will help clients with the high cost of sending a child to school, to help pay for things such as textbooks and school uniforms.

Interested in helping out. A powerful and understated phrase that led to one man flanked by two dedicated friends joining forces with the nation's leading bicycle re-use program to deliver hope to rural Honduras. Featured Volunteer? Yeah, that's an understatement.

Getting Back To School

The desire to stay in school is often challenged by the need to drop out for many poorer children in remote areas of the world. In villages around the globe, where students often live several miles from school without affordable transportation, drop-out rates in high schools and even middle schools are soaring.

Yellow Boat of HOPE provides boats for Filipino students

Many rural communities often have rocky, narrow paths leading from students' homes to their far off schools. In the Philippines, which is a country of small islands, some students even have to cross water in order to attend school.

Adding to the challenge of simply getting to school, many families cannot afford to have their children away from home for long periods of time. Many are responsible for household chores, caring for siblings, and even working in the community to help their families.

As students become older and enter high school, their commutes often become longer, sometimes 2-3 hours of their days. They have less time for homework and find themselves tired in the classroom. For a family that may earn only $25 US a week, having that child drop out to help around the house is often better for the family.

But ultimately not better for the child. Or the community. Education is the key to making their communities better and their governments stronger. Shortening commutes and giving back the to the families the precious resource of time is a good place to start. And a bicycle is a great way to accomplish that.

In Honduras, one family is struggling with more than just how to get to school; Norma, the mother of three sons, cannot afford to send her oldest son back to school. When Ronaldo entered seventh grade, he was walking two hours every day in extreme heat, just to get to and from school. He ended up dropping out.

Now Ronaldo is 15 and wants to go back to school. He is the oldest of three boys and wants to set a good example for his brothers. He also realized he couldn't reach his potential without a degree. Unfortunately, his family did not have the economic resources to help him re-enroll.

But just this month, thanks to the partnership with Bikes for the World, Adelante, a micro-finance program in Honduras, is addressing this problem. They are not only assisting by getting bikes to rural areas to help kids with transportation to school, but they are also helping provide loans for school associated costs.

Profits from the bike project will help fund a Secondary Education Loan initiative created to support family's like Ronaldo's. This will help with the high cost of uniforms, textbooks, and administration fees required at the beginning of a school year allowing Ronaldo to fulfill his dream of continuing his education.

From Students in NC to Students in Honduras

In 2013 Bikes for the World teamed up with Gildan Activewear to deliver a trial shipment of about 100 bikes to a potential new partner in Honduras. Bikes for the World already works with Art for Humanity, a local non-profit, to occasionally donate a few bikes in containers they pack full of a variety of donated items.

This pilot effort by Bikes for the World and Gildan Activewear delivered a container of bikes to a micro-finance group called  Fundacion Adelante. Adelante was founded in 1999 in response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Mitch, which left $3.8 billion in damages and over three million citizens homeless.

Adelante provides short-term small business loans to the poorest of the poor rural Honduran women, so they can invest in small businesses to earn income to support themselves and their families. Over time, the women use their business profits to buy better food for their families, improve their homes, buy medicine when necessary, send their children to school, and save for the future.

Reagan High School students

Bikes collected at Gildan's Branded Apparel division headquarters in South Carolina were loaded into an empty container heading back to Honduras where Gildan also operates.

In addition to the bikes collected at Gildan, Bikes for the World arranged to have bikes collected on our behalf at Reagan High School in North Carolina transported to Gildan. The bikes collected by these students were also loaded onto this container donated to Adelante in Honduras.

Reagan High's Key Club has partnered with Bikes for the World the last three years. We can't always track where an individual bike may end up, but in this case, bikes collected at Reagan High during the 2013 collection were all shipped to Honduras. Knowing how those bikes are helping a community reinforces the impact those students are making not only in their home town of Pfafftown, NC, but also in five separate regions in Honduras.

Adelante received this donation of bicycles, delivered by Gildan, at the beginning of 2014. The profits from bike sales are funding a new Educational Loan project established just this month that will begin in 2015.

Adelante is distributing our donated bicycles at a low cost in rural areas that have little access to resources and reliable transportation. Bikes will help keep students enrolled in school and also help Adelante clients transport goods with greater ease.

Clients are eligible for an Educational Loan to help finance sending their kids to school. Adelante learned that 35% of their clients have children between the ages of 12-20 that have dropped out of school. Another 37% of clients have children at risk of dropping out before graduation.

¿Qué es una meta?

Courtesy Adelante

Bikes for the World is set to send a container of bikes to Fundacion Adelante in Honduras later this year. This shipment will be made possible in part thanks to the support of our newest corporate partner, Gildan Activewear , whose Branded Apparel division headquarters are based out of South Carolina.

Adelante works with the poorest individuals, mostly women, in rural Honduras to help improve the quality of life for them and their families. Adelante provides short term loans to help establish and sustain small businesses such as food stands and tortillas sales.

Adelante's model is very similar to the program Bikes for the World supports in Costa Rica under FINCA. Adelante is a micro-finance provider lending an average loan of between $25-50 which is paid back in full with interest.

Children in Atlantida Courtesy Adelante

The loans are largely meant to help move women out of poverty by empowering them to help themselves. Honduras is labeled as the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Many struggling rural Hondurans have many children, may be single mothers, have limited education, and are living hand to mouth. These are the potential clients Adelante reaches out to.

Adelante's main focus, in addition to immediately improving the quality of life for this population, is also to instill long term change within the community. Reaching children remains their main goal and they know the way to do that is through moms.

Marlena Courtesy Adelante

¿Qué es una meta? Every business venture needs a clear defined vision. Adelante works with potential borrowers to set up their own business models, stressing one major goal, una meta, from the start. Often, several people will band together to take out one loan, each needing to trust the other.

Adelante then instills the following values in the budding entrepreneurs: Unity, Discipline, Work, and Courage. All parties signing for the loan are jointly responsible for paying back the loan on time. The group meets regularly to report their progress.

Meet Marlena. Marlena is a single mother living in La Masica. She joined with several other women in the area to take out a loan with Adelante. Marlena's goal was to make and sell tortillas with corn she intended to buy with the money from the loan.

Marlena was able to buy a small portion of corn to start her business through this loan. She sells tortillas right out of her home, but as you can see, she uses a bike to get the corn home from the market.

Bikes are a valuable resource in rural Honduras where a majority of people walk to get to work and school. Bikes for the World works with a local group called Art for Humanity to bring small quantities of bikes into the country. What we learned from this effort is: it's often hard to get much needed resources into the country.

So when one of the marketing directors at Gildan,  a leading supplier of quality branded basic family apparel, including T-shirts, fleece, sports shirts, socks and underwear, approached us about bikes for Honduras we were all ears. Turns out Gildan is the largest private employer in Honduras. And Gildan had una meta, one goal, to establish major charitable partnerships with organizations whose mission is in line with Gildan's community involvement objectives. 

Turns out Gildan is also a socially responsible, environmentally conscious company. Just last year they recycled 87% of their waste company-wide. They also give back to their communities where they operate by funding a number of initiatives and promoting employee volunteering. They have provided scholarships and assisted in various school renovations in countries such as Haiti, Barbados, Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua. And now they will be helping to provide bikes to families and workers in Honduras.

Courtesy Adelante

The vision: together Bikes for the World and Gildan could collect, store, and ship several hundred bikes to Adelante in Honduras by the end of the year. With Gildan's help and resources, Bikes for the World is now expanding south to make this initiative a go.

Keith Whitaker, that market director we just told you about, is leading the effort by first holding a collection at Gildan's Branded Apparel Division headquarters in Charleston, South Carolina. He is also talking with other groups in the community, hoping to organize several more bike collections in the coming months. 

Bikes collected in North and  South Carolina will be combined for this one goal, providing affordable transportation to rural Hondurans while supporting the micro-finance program currently in place. Once we have enough bikes in Carolina, Gildan will assist in loading them onto a returning container, typically heading back to Honduras empty. The bike shipment will be sent directly to the Caribbean coast, where Gildan is based and the efforts of Adelante are most greatly felt.

Donate your bikes in South Carolina October 21-25. Check our website for details.