Encouraging youth cycling through school partnerships
Over the past year and a half, New Hope Community Bikes in Hamilton, ON has been running programs to get more kids cycling, especially for their school commute.
We created a weeklong educational program called Ride Smart!, where we bring a class set of bikes, instructors, and obstacles to schools to teach grade 4-6 students the basics of road safety, skilled riding, and mechanical safety checks, as well as show them how fun cycling is.
We pair this instruction with on-site tuneups and partner with organizations that provide bikes to schools for kids who don't own them. We also work with our city's public health staff on School Travel Planning, where the school population is consulted to find out what they need in order to walk or cycle more, and the neighbourhood is analyzed for infrastructure gaps.
I can speak about our experiences with these programs, the challenges and rewards involved with getting something like this going, and best practices we've found for successfully working with school and government systems.
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anglais
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Approche communautaire