The Costco Connection - December 2015

Wheels of Change

IN 2011, Dan Austin had an outdated fleet of 150 bikes from his Montana-based tour operation company, Austin Adventures.

“The bikes were still very usable,” he says.

“I knew, from my tour operations work
there, that Africa needed our help.”
Austin and his son, Andy, joined forces
with Bicycling Empowerment Network
(BEN) Namibia ( bennamibia.org), and created
Wheels of Change International (WOC;
wocinternational.org). A nonprofit operated
completely by volunteers and donations,
WOC collects donated and discarded bikes
from their chapters throughout the U.S.
and ships them to Africa.

When the bikes arrive, WOC staff train locals in bicycle mechanics and business management. The shipping containers then

Costco members doing
their part to help make the
world a better place

AFTER SUFFERING near-fatal injuries from a ladder fall in 2007, Larsen Jay was thankful for the outpouring of support his loved ones showed through sending flowers. While his own hospital room became a floral refuge, he was jolted to see the bleak surroundings of many other patients. Few had visitors, familial support or flowers.

Jay immediately began wheeling his own flowers into the rooms of fellow hospital residents, unwittingly launching what would become the nonprofit Random Acts of Flowers (RAF; randomactsofflowers.org).

Launched in Knoxville, Tennessee, one year later, and now with locations in the metropolitan areas of Chicago, Tampa Bay, Florida, and Silicon Valley, RAF is described by Jay as “a food bank for flowers.” are converted into bike shops that sell, service and rent bicycles at a subsidized cost, with

100 percent of all profits going back into various nongovernmental organizations throughout the community. There are now

36 shops, all successful and run by the trained locals, in Kenya, Namibia and Zambia. More than 33,000 bikes have been shipped to Africa through WOC and BEN.

Bikes are a transformational element in
impoverished areas, says Austin. For example,
they provide a vehicle for improved health care
in remote villages. A health-care worker can
cover four times more ground on a bike than
on foot, meaning more patient visits, more
medication disbursements and longer visits
with each patient. Some bikes are actually
used as ambulances.

For household chores, a bike carries up to five times the load that a pedestrian can carry. Austin reports that statistics show youths are 70 percent more likely to attend school if their household owns a bicycle, since they have a means of transport.

Austin comments, “Each bike will have
a new story.”
—Irene Middleman Thomas is a
freelance writer based in Colorado

C hanging the world

RAF partners with local grocery stores, florists, wedding venues, funeral homes, etc. to take used or unsellable floral arrangements back to their central processing facility. There, volunteers remove dead or wilting flowers and donate them to a company that creates compost. The thriving flowers are rearranged to make beautiful bouquets and then delivered to hospitals, nursing homes, rehabilitation centers and others.

At the health-care facility, the staff chooses recipients who might need a pick-me-up or patients without a support network. “[The staff] knows who needs that touch point at the right time,” says Jay.