Dan Austin is executive director and co-founder of 88Bikes, a nonprofit organization that delivers bicycles to children who face challenges due to war, conflict, poverty, disease or other regional hardships. To learn more about 88Bikes, visit 88Bikes.org.
Wend: Tell us about the humble beginnings of 88Bikes.
Austin: My brother, Jared, and I were going to do a ride across Cambodia, and we decided to give our bikes away at the end. Through some contacts at National Geographic, we found a good orphanage in Phnom Penh. We realized a couple (of) weeks before we left, though, that there were 88 kids in the orphanage, meaning 86 kids would be left out. So we threw a fundraiser, launched a website and within four days we had all the donations we needed to give bikes to all 88 kids. It was such a scene of jubilation and pure, unbridled happiness that we knew right then that we needed to do it again.
Wend: What value do you hope kids will get from these bicycles?
Austin: For our second project, we hauled 200 bikes in a truck way up to this refugee camp in northern Uganda, and we endowed them to kids who had been rescued from being child soldiers in the Ugandan civil war. The kids who get bikes from us tend to have been through a lot, and I hope the bikes are a way to—obviously, they’re a good way to get to school and make some money or whatever, help their families out, but I hope they’re more a way to reconnect these kids with the lost fragments of their childhood. It’s about happiness; it’s about them getting out there and enjoying the world.
Wend: What are some of the challenges that face your organization?
Austin: The initial challenge is finding the best bikes, which we buy in country, from locals. We try to find the prestige utilitarian steel-frame bikes: no derailleurs, just simple, easy-to-fix machines that will last forever. Getting the bikes to the villages can also be a challenge. We’ll be delivering 300 bikes to this rural village in central Mozambique soon, but the village is so isolated that the only way to get them the last 14 miles is to ride them there. We’ve got 70 local volunteers set to ride the bikes into the village (and) then walk back and do it again. Probably our biggest challenge of all is finding good partners. We need strong NGOs on the ground that have the kids’ best interests in mind—ones that have been there a long time and developed honest working relationships with their communities.
Wend: Tell us about your volunteer program.
Austin: We send back volunteers to each site, usually at least twice a year, to spend a couple of weeks with the kids teaching bike repair and safety workshops, taking them on rides and encouraging them to see the bike as a starting point from which they can expand. In India, our volunteers led kids in painting this incredible mural at the orphanage that represents the things they want to do on their bikes in terms of exploring the world. The kids in Mongolia actually earned their bikes by painting a huge mural. The governor donated a stand in the middle of town and brought the cherry picker out to lift the mural onto it.
Wend: What’s an exciting project you’re working on this year?
Austin: We’re partnering with this tremendous NGO called DesignBuildBLUFF that works with architecture students to design and build sustainable housing on the Navajo Nation reservation in Utah. I met with them about a year ago and asked if they’d be interested in building a sustainable bike shop. They were. I just got the first designs yesterday, and it’s going to be amazing. They’re using cars that have been crushed and piled up on the reservation to build it. We had one of our volunteers (a bike mechanic) suggest how the space (should) be configured so that the bike shop would have the truing wheel and everything they need in a small space. It’s built on a trailer so it can be hauled around the reservation for different workshops and things. We’re going to endow 50-150 bikes—depending on what we can do—to kids on the reservation when they open the shop this summer.
Wend: How can readers become more involved?
Austin: They can always go to our website and make a donation of $88 (the cost of a bicycle in a developing country). Beyond that, we’re just happy to have people following us on Facebook. Folks can definitely contact us if they want to volunteer, especially if they have bike mechanic skills. We work in tons of sites around the world and always need people to go back. Volunteers will have a great time working with the kids, fixing up their bikes, and we have strong partners on the ground to host them. 
