Volunteers, donors, partners, customers and friends,
Thank you for your tremendous support during a challenging, memorable and ultimately very successful year. We could not have survived and thrived without all of your generosity, flexibility and hard work.
By every measurement, we’ve had a successful year. Our year, briefly, in numbers:
- 782 bikes donated, a 46% increase over 2020
- 8792 volunteer hours, a 75% increase over 2020 (in part because we've been more successful getting volunteers to log their hours)
- 425 unique volunteers, a 37% increase over 2020
- 241 total locks, lights and helmets donated
- 90 bikes to students outside of our typical charity partners
Donating 782 bikes out to the community is an impressive feat for any year, but especially impressive during a pandemic. That number is oh-so-close to the 820 bikes we donated before the pandemic, which required well over 10,000 volunteer hours and over 1,000 volunteers! Congratulations to all of you for such productivity!
That also represents many bikes kept from the waste stream and given new life to change lives.
It's Not about the Bikes, but the People
All those volunteer hours add up to more than a year's worth of hours refurbishing bikes as well as teaching and learning the art of bicycle repair.
So many volunteers played a big role in this year's success, but I'd like to give a special shout-out to all the volunteers who put in 20 or more hours this year:
| Cap'N Jonny | Ethan Casale | Johnnie Tom | Gunter Steinbach |
| Michael Khaw | Roger Conley Smith | Peter Hansell | Shaun Hamelin-Owens |
| Rob Matusiak | Luke Zhou | Scott Mccalmont | Patrick Sanders |
| Jack Miller | David Kautz | Raghavendra Rao Loka | Grant Grundler |
| Lucy Hsu | Gabe Espinoza | Christopher Tang | Andrey Petrov |
| Judy Colwell | Mark | Robert Neff | Helen Hsiu |
| Dave Fork | Sue | Patrick Twohy | Ethan Sa |
| John Langbein | John Griffin | Rob Kleinschmidt | Joey Davancaze |
| Mateo Espinoza | Shounak Ghosh | Bennett Wong | Isaac Moore |
| Tom Feledy | Colleen Delizza | Jay Rosser | Kurin Tu |
| Mary Kelly | Carol Mattsson | Chris Jasper | Abner Germanow |
| Pete Letchworth | Bert Nelson | Girard Chandler | Kai Yee |
| David Geraghty | Doreen Yen | John Garrish | Dov Shiffman |
| Shree Sandilya | Dave Erskine | Lauren Zuravleff | Kelly Moore |
| Taghi Saadati | Rachael Harding | Arseny | Dave Kamp |
| Paul Southworth |
Funding the Fundamentals
Donating so many bikes takes quite a bit of financial resources, especially with bike part prices at an all-time high. I’m proud and humbled that we received five generous grants in 2021, increasing our grant funding by 360% over 2020. Hundreds of individual donors and customers also played a critical role in supporting our mission. These funds were instrumental in helping us:
- fund parts for donation bikes
- buy lights, locks and helmets to donate
- launch our school bike program
- supplement our volunteer workforce with paid mechanics
- donate bikes we'd normally sell
- offset a decline in corporation-matched donations.
A big thank you to the Philanthropic Ventures Foundation, the Los Altos Mountain View Community Foundation, Palo Alto Weekly Holiday Fund, Bright Horizon Global Foundation and the state of California for the help during this challenging time.
Collaboration and Growth
The year was also one of collaboration. We supported peer nonprofits by donating bikes and parts to Live in Peace, Good Karma Bikes and Community Cycles. We helped out our sister org, Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition, by hosting aid stations for its Bike to Wherever Day as well as its fundraiser ride. We also partnered with the towns of Morgan Hill, Gilroy and Mountain View as well as Hope's Corner and Patagonia to support their community events.
Our team also grew in 2021! We added Gregg Kato as a full-time employee to support our shop operations and run our eBay sales. Gregg has been invaluable in keeping our shop running smoothly. Tuong Pham has joined us for four separate internship sessions and helped us with our school outreach, electronic receipt system and parts and tool finder. And we’ve been grateful for the expertise of professional mechanics Lucas Hopkins and Christian Parker in tuning up our for-sale bikes.
We also added two new board members, with Lucy Hsu joining our board as Treasurer and Roger Conley Smith joining as a board member at large.
Looking Forward
We’ve got big plans for 2022, and hope you’ll continue your tremendous support to help us achieve them. We aim to donate 1,000 bikes to the community, host monthly events to repair bikes in the community, expand our volunteer training, and add new talent to our crew of mechanics and QA specialists.
Can we count on your support of this mission? You can support us with your wallet, time or bikes, or purchase a refurbished bike or silent auction prize. Any of these actions go a long way towards helping BikeX build on an amazing 2021 and achieve our ambitious 2022 goals.
I can't predict the pandemic or whether we'll still be wearing masks or working outdoors for all of 2022, but I can promise we'll have a productive, fun year together.
Thank you all for such an awesome year. It’s been an honor and privilege to serve the BikeX family.
Sincerely,
Andrew Yee
Executive Director
