One Street News

February-March 2018

Vol. 11, Issue 2

  1. DR Congo Partner Ready for Bicycles
  2. Social Change through Bicycles and Healthy Organizations
  3. Resources - Vision Zero Has Failed, Stop Child Murder Instead
  4. Hot Topics - The Damage Done by America’s Bike Helmet Fixation

DR Congo Partner Ready for Bicycles

By: Sue Knaup, Executive Director

In our last newsletter, I noted our successful work with an extraordinary nonprofit in DR Congo, Organisation Humanitaire pour l'Éducation et le Développement (OHED). Their new website is now live! There you can read about their impressive efforts to alleviate poverty and famine, all led by local Congolese. I’m honored to work with them.

OHED and its leaders are quite special because they have done all the work for their neighbors in their first three years of existence without any funding from outsiders. They founded OHED in 2014 because they were fed up with the rampant destruction caused by armed bandits who still prowl their province in the east of DR Congo. Villagers are forced to flee to other villages, causing famine and disease through overcrowding.

OHED’s founders realized that they could fight back by training their neighbors in efficient farming methods so that even the refugees would have enough to eat until they could return home. Through their 56 coordinated villages and 3,000 volunteers, they have established 46 new farms and trained thousands of Congolese in efficient farming and disease prevention. They’ve built offices and training centers and created teams of specialized trainers for various career development programs. All of these successes have been reached through donations of time and materials from their members.

I’m now helping them to connect with donors who can help them build their bicycle program. Each of their villages has a few bikes, but they are in high demand and often break down. They need hundreds more bikes before most of their members will have reliable transportation.

The most likely foundations and other donors we’ve found all have forms to follow that ask questions not easily answered by OHED. A simple income/expense statement, so easy for most nonprofits, becomes a convoluted web of in-kind donations in order to explain their infrastructure with only a trickle of money.

We’re figuring it out! I’ll soon help them submit their first proposal for a container of hundreds of used bikes from the U.S. Even if the proposal is approved, this will only be the beginning. For the first time since their founding, OHED will need significant funding in order to pay for the bikes to be shipped, then to set up their bicycle repair training center in Bukavu Town.

If you would like to help with this effort, please go to OHED’s Donate page to learn how to contribute. Make sure to let them know your donation is meant for their bicycle program. If you want to learn more about this effort, you can also contact me at sue{at}onestreet.org.

Social Change through Bicycles and Healthy Organizations

By: Sue Knaup, Executive Director

The publication of my memoir, Bike Hunt, gave me the opportunity to present at various venues and through various media about the power of bicycles for improving our world. Even though, or perhaps because Bike Hunt covers my struggle toward that goal, the book offers the perfect backdrop for intense discussions on this topic. Read more here.

Resources - Vision Zero Has Failed, Stop Child Murder Instead

This recent article does an excellent job of showing why the concept of Vision Zero – to stop all deaths in traffic – has failed and why a much more meaningful message, which worked in the Netherlands in the 1970s, could be the better choice.

Hot Topics - The Damage Done by America’s Bike Helmet Fixation

If you have found that disturbing propaganda about bicycle helmets has undermined your efforts to increase bicycling, please read this recent article. It shows the significant damage done to the bicycle advocacy movement by horrifying images of smashed heads, meant to sell bike helmets.