When roaming around for Crazy Daze this morning, I picked up a couple of books at Monkey See, Monkey Read and noticed the very cool bike proprietor Jerry Bilek had on the sidewalk.
No, he’s not going into the bike business; he’s going into humanitarian aid.
In his blog entry about the bike and the concept, Jerry says,
For every two bikes I sell, Kona will donate one to a home health worker in Africa as part of the BikeTown Africa program. This video explains the program better than I can.
This particular bike is a single-speed utilitarian model with “thorn-proof tires”. A three-speed model is also available. Go to Jerry’s blog to get to the tech specs of the bike; I just liked the idea that you can shop local and support an important humanitarian cause at the same time. Jerry, like many of our independent retailers here in Northfield, has a lot of interesting ideas.
Thanks for spotlighting this, Tracy! I was glad to hear from Jerry that he was doing this. I look forward to seeing the bikes. I donated some books to Jerry to support the cause, and others may want to do the same.
thanks for posting this Tracy.
Hayes on a bike and the benefits of biking:
http://monkeyread.wordpress.com/
Jerry–
You might want to fix your blog. The latest entry about the bikes says you will donate one for every two books sold. I think you mean every two bikes, right? (If I didn’t notice things like this, I probably would be out of work.) Anyhow, good luck with this project. I saw the bikes outside your shop yesterday but at that time didn’t know what they were for. Now I understand.
Susan,
thanks, it’s fixed.