BOISE, Idaho —
After asking for bicycle donations, the Boise Bicycle Project’s (BBP) campaign comes to fruition for the fifteenth year in a row, donating hundreds of refurbished dream bikes to kids from families in need.
Each year BBP contacts local non-profits, schools, teachers, and social workers to identify kids who need bicycles. The kids are then given a piece of paper and are told to draw their dream bike and a story about it.
“We take every single one of those pictures to create a specific bike for them,” said Jimmy Hallyburton from BBP. “So we have a lot of pressure on us because we know as soon as those kids draw that picture that they are starting to dream about this bike and what it's going to look like and what it's going to be like when they get it.”
The nonprofit then has hundreds of volunteers come into the shop throughout December to build the custom dream bikes. “If the kid says yellow peddles, you know, we're putting yellow peddles on there, if the kid says blue grips, we're doing that,” Hallyburton said. “We make sure every single bicycle really fits the drawing and the story the kids gave us”
In the early years of the Kids Bike Giveaway, the campaign was much smaller than it is today. Volunteers worked with limited tools and space, but the campaign has now grown so large that BBP, for the second year in a row, must store the finished dream bikes in an empty restaurant down the street.
“We always set out to make Boise the bicycle capital of America and that was a place where everyone had access to a bicycle,” Hallyburton said. “So I guess in some ways we thought it was going to grow this big and in other ways we know we still have a lot of areas to grow that there are still kids who need our bicycles, but we know that the community support will keep coming and as long as it does, we'll continue to grow it in really fun and beautiful ways.”
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