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Rolling into 2025 with big plans to empower youth

by Executive Director: Laura Shutiak

Our tiny organization continues to do big things in our city. We are on a mission to empower youth with the skills and equipment to get around independently.

We know that with some education, and a good used bike and helmet, youth are empowered to explore their city, connect to community and go places.  

A man wearing a Youth en Route t-shirt helps a high school student put on her bicycle helmet.
Stuart helps an Our Lady of the Rockies student to wear a helmet to start her biking lesson.

We are just wrapping up our last fiscal year with the filing of our charitable return, posting of our financial statements and sharing our Annual Report. Our Annual General Meeting will take place early in February.  

And we’re so looking forward to 2025.  

More schools, more students, bigger impact

Since September, we’ve taught 1,200 students cycling skills. Our biggest schools have been Father Lacombe (410), Our Lady of the Rockies (360) and Crescent Heights (100) .  We were at 13 schools in both public school systems.

101 special education students at five schools have had access to cycling, trikes and tons of fun.  

Group of teachers and students prepare to embark on a bicycle ride.
Kauther prepares to cycle with the students at Queen Elizabeth.

We expect to get to all schools that we’ve given bikes to in the next few months. Super exciting!

We are keen to continue finding new schools and teachers wanting to have this programming for their kids. We hope to have programs in Calgary Catholic schools in Airdrie and Cochrane.  

More bikes

With our new focus on making sure youth have the equipment they need to use their skills; we’ve really leaned on our partners at the Bike Shed at the Greater Forest Lawn 55+ Society.

Last year, they helped us refurbish 193 bikes for schools and youth. To date this year, we’ve delivered 158. And it’s just going to get busier as we get into our spring programming.  

Bent Nielsen retrieving bicycles at the bike dump to repair them.

To meet our need for refurbished bikes, we are keen to enhance the Circular Economy as it relates to bikes in Calgary. To many bikes end up in landfills, and by the time our salvagers can get to them, they are rusted and much harder to refurbish.  We are excited to launch a couple of key new initiatives to help make it easier for Calgarians to get old bikes rolling again with new owners. 

  

Laura and Adam spreading the importance of biking and collaboration.

Stay tuned on this front. And as always, if you have a bike you’d like to donate to us, please know that our great partner Adam Rhind at Bathtub Bikes is our drop of location for any bike or parts donations.

New, exciting partnerships

We have a great new partnership with students at West Island College. The private school in SE Calgary has student time set aside for kids to pursue a passion. They’ve started a bike recycling program. We take them bikes, they work on them, and they go back to students in our program. To date, we’ve got four fixed up bikes that have got to kids who want bikes.  

This is just one example of a new partnership that we expect will pay huge dividends to four our work this year.  

We are also keen to lean on and learn more from our Youth Advisory Council. The more meetings we have, the more I’m inspired by these young leaders, driven to share our mission and vision in their communities. You’ll see and hear more from them this year.  

A place to call home

Youth en Route has always delivered our programs at schools. And so we’ve never needed a physical location for our work. Our employees could be home based. But now that we are working to deliver bikes to youth at schools each month, we’ve found we need a better place to work, accessible storage and space for our five part time staff. 

One of our goals in the next few months is to find funding to support leasing space. It’s a challenging item to find funding for, and we’ve got a strong business case. We know we can do more with the right space to work.  

We’re on the hunt for the right location. If you can help us, please use our contact form to reach out.  

Kauther and Stuart advocating for Youth en Route.

The challenges

Our biggest challenge continues to be finding the long-term sustainable funding that allows us to just be able to work. Our financial statements showed we operated on about $130,000 last year. We’ve already had an income of about $100,000 to date, so we are growing our ability to raise funds. But we have a huge demand for our work, and we can’t meet it with where we are at.

We had donations from over 140 people last year – which is amazing.  We also had support from groups, including the Southern Alberta Chapter of the International transportation engineers Southern Alberta – ITE Canada, which is pretty neat.  

If you want to make a donation – here’s a link: Donate to Youth en Route 

Empowering youth

This drives everything we do. We know that freedom to travel independently is empowering. But cycling is also critical to reducing emissions that cause climate change.  

As the world watched the devastating fires in Los Angeles, many people felt helpless. It’s hard to put into context the desire to DO something.

Donating funds to fire victims is a simple way to help. But it doesn’t go to the root cause.  

Our cyclist in residence, Duncan giving biking lessons during Physical Education class.

As these climate-change fuelled disasters grow to impact more people and areas, we think cycling also delivers another benefit to youth – the feeling that they are active in finding solutions and show they are willing to make choices that can reduce emissions.  

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