Community Outreach Update: September 2020

It’s been a while since we have written one of these posts, but we are slowly starting to reintroduce the services of our Community Outreach team, after a Covid-19 hiatus.

You might notice that our team names have changed. We used to use project names such as VeloCommunities, Wheelbeing, and The Bike Academy, but after reflecting on the principles of good service design we decided to use names that clearly reflected the work that we do.

Read on to find out what our (newly-named) teams have been up to…

Skills and Development Team

New outdoor FYOB set-up at South Community Hub

• Held 13 outdoor Fix Your Own Bikes for 53 adults and 6 young people, including 2 specific Spokes not Blokes sessions for 9 women and non-binary participants.
• Delivered 8 Dr Bikes, fixing 76 bikes for people in the community.
• Held 14 days of volunteer bike maintenance sessions, teaching a wonderful team of 8 volunteers how to clean, strip, and prepare donated bikes for refurbishment – the team has worked on over 66 bikes in the past 2 months!
• Run 10 ‘Govanhill Gears’ cycle sessions with 13 young people in Govanhill.
• Delivered cycle sessions to 4 different local youth groups, teaching young people how to cycle confidently, and how to cycle on the roads.
• Delivered a City & Guilds Level 3 qualification in Cycle Mechanics to 4 students from local schools. The schools courses are now fully booked until 2021.
• A Build Your Own Bike course is starting next week for 4 young people looking to develop their cycle maintenance skills. All 4 of these upcoming courses are now fully booked.

Health and Wellbeing Team

Glasgow City Mission on a led ride to Victoria Park

• Wrapped up the Wellbeing Fund project, in total providing 116 low-income families with bikes for their kids, for mental and physical health benefits during lockdown.
• Have signed up 346 new Bikes For All memberships since April, allowing hundreds of people on low to no income to travel around Glasgow by hire bike at no cost to them.
• The team have tracked that 10% of Glasgow nextbike usage comes from Bikes For All account holders.
• Have reinstated regular Wednesday afternoon Bikes For All sign ups, taking place from 1-5pm outside in the West Community Hub car park. You can drop in any time to get a free nextbike membership.
• Led Glasgow City Mission on a ride to Victoria Park.
• Led rides are starting next week with Govan Community Project, Phoenix Futures and Mount Vernon Community Centre.
• Weekly women and non-binary learn to ride, and gentle ride sessions are beginning again next week, on Thursday mornings.

Active Travel Team

Karolis modelling the Urban Arrow E-Cargo bike

• Successfully launched our new E-Cargo Bike Library, providing a range of E-Cargo bikes and trailers for local businesses to use as an easy way to save money, and the environment.
• Are running community drop-in days at both our South and West hubs on Friday and Wednesdays respectively, for our local communities to swing by with any queries on our community outreach programme.
• Cycle lessons are popular and busy. Our focus is on getting people out cycling as a mode of transportation, so a big part of what we offer is road confidence sessions.
• Helped to deliver a number of ‘Curious Commuter’ stalls, and led rides, along with Woodlands Community Trust based in the West of Glasgow.
• Are continuing to offer ‘Bike Buddy’ sessions; where a cycle instructor is available to help users plan a cycle-safe route to their work – this can be in person or virtually.

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