Kauther Alsaimari saw the bikes being delivered by Youth en Route (YER) to Calgary schools and she thought it would be great to bring that experience to her community.

Alsaimari, a fourth-year University of Calgary student, has been working with the active transportation advocacy group over the summer as an education assistant, developing education plans to complement the bike delivery.

She put together a proposal to have some of the bikes delivered this week to members of her southeast Calgary mosque, the Iman Ali Association.

“I’ve just seen that (YER executive director) Laura (Shutiak) has been giving out bikes to multiple schools and communities, and I thought, ‘why not have some bikes be delivered and distributed to members from my community,” Alsaimari told LiveWire Calgary.

Through the planning, Alsaimari worked with community leaders to identify 20 people who could benefit from having a bike for transportation. She said access to a bike is one of the biggest barriers to active mobility.

“A lot of the people that got a bike today, they’ve just never owned a bike, or they shared a bike with their sibling, which, there’s nothing wrong with that. But sometimes, the siblings want to go bike riding together, right?” Alsaimari said.

“It’s just like a sense of freedom.”

Laura Shutiak, executive director of Youth en Route, said that Alsaimari has been the driving force behind getting bikes to more than 15 people already.

“She just recognized how empowering a bike is,” Shutiak said.

“She came to us with this proposal to get some bikes to people at her mosque that, for a range of reasons, didn’t have the ability to get a bike.”

Youth en Route provides young Calgarians with the skills and equipment to embark on cycling as a means of transportation. They work with city schools to get bikes in the hands of people who are interested in riding.

Ownership is the biggest barrier

Shutiak said that they’ve evolved their mission to address the gap they see in having people riding bikes as transportation. They’ve learned this over the past year as they’ve helped educate and empower more than 1,300 students citywide.

“It became very obvious that the big barrier is actually bike ownership, and so we’ve now tinkered with our business plan,” she said.

“So, what we plan on doing come September is any student that goes through our programs, we’re going to offer them a bike.”

Quite often, students themselves won’t ask for the bikes, Shutiak said.

“The problem is, is that if we just leave it to kids to ask for a bike, they don’t even know they want one, because they don’t know what a bike can do to them,” she said.

“If they’re in a phys ed class and they do a five-kilometer bike ride to a park or whatever, then they’re like, ‘Oh, that wasn’t that hard.’ They can do that. Then they want to bike because then they see how it can open doors would be freedom for them.”

She said that’s what’s changed overall. They’re now doing what they can to get bikes into people’s hands. Not just through schools, but through community giveaways like the one at Alsaimari’s mosque.

“It’s just kind of empowering youth and the freedom aspect of it, but it also benefits the world that we live in,” Alsaimari said.

“There’s so many aspects of it, we want to encourage youth to take initiative and use a bike to get from one place to another, and that does help with the environment.”