Kim is a bicycle education contractor with Avanti High School and Inner City Transit Walk N Roll, as well as a community organizer in Olympia, Washington. Kim has been working on bikes for over 3 years and has been running a twice monthly trans bike ride locally. These rides have ranged from gravel cycling to beginner mountain biking rides to skill building classes. She’s engaged with a lot of new and first-time gravel cyclists.
Kim is drawn to community building in the area due to the lack of diversity she’s seen in the outdoors in her region, and now works to create more inclusiveness and increase representation in the outdoor and cycling communities. Kim is currently working on a burgeoning gear library and sees this as a path to their next steps of facilitating other outdoor events, classes, bikepacking and camping trips, and a myriad of guided adventures.
Olive (they/them) is a community organizer and environmental advocate living in Olympia, WA on the unceded land of the Coast Salish Peoples. Olive’s love for the outdoors began in childhood and blossomed into a passion for backpacking and biking as an adult, thanks to friends who generously shared their knowledge and gear.
They believe in the transformative power of nature and work to remove barriers to outdoor recreation by leading hiking trips, skillshares, and co-facilitating a gear lending library. In their free time, Olive enjoys ceramics, gardening, and foraging for mushrooms. They are passionate about mutual aid, harm reduction, and trans joy.
Founded by Maxx Aguilar, Black Transport Project (BTP) is an initiative that organizes community events and gives away bikes to Black trans people in the Chicago area. Eligible people who do not have a bike can apply for free, then they are entered into a raffle system, and matched applicants will be paired with a bike that fits their size. Aguilar spearheaded this initiative to fix used bikes and distribute them to Black transgender individuals in the Chicago community, distributing over 65 refurbished bikes since 2020!
In the last year, BTP has focused on hosting community events and supporting new cyclists by teaching them basic mechanic skills and on-the-bike commuting skills. BTP has plans for a bikepacking retreat to introduce recipients who have demonstrated interest in bikepacking with bikes they have received from the giveaway program. As of April 2024, BTP has made headway on the Summer 2024 giveaway goals and welcomes this opportunity to include bikepacking in BTP programming for 2024-2025.
The Outdoor Inclusion Coalition (OIC) is an organization based in Pittsburgh, PA focused on supporting the outdoor exploration of underrepresented community members through free and minimal-cost resources, activities, and events such as skiing, snowboarding, climbing, and camping. They’ve partnered with local bike shops to facilitate community rides on the Great Allegheny Passage, experiencing a growing interest in multi day rides and multi activity trips like riding the GAP to Ohiopyle, camping, and climbing before returning to Pittsburgh. They’d like to support the community in this effort while adding the bike-packing gear to a gear library for community members to utilize at their will and expand the offerings we can provide to public schools and community bike groups.
In addition to the utilization with the immediate Pittsburgh community, the OIC is partnering with Boyz N the Wood to host a black men’s retreat for 12 participants, September 16-22 featuring a GAP and C&O Canal trail ride to Washington, DC, with a group of men, utilizing bike-packing as a restorative space for black men to heal and forge connections with other black men, nature, and themselves.
At All Bikes Welcome, their mission is to use recreational cycling to foster personal growth and meaningful community for marginalized folks through low-cost programming, education, and events. As one of the few organizations working at the intersections of race, gender, class, and ability, their number one priority is to provide equitable access to the outdoors in a safe and welcoming environment. As they continue to grow, their aim is to provide new opportunities and initiatives to support community-centric programming.
To that end, they aim to implement a gear library accessible to the public. With the implementation of a gear library, All Bikes Welcome aims to expand their programming to include beginner-friendly bikepacking trips.
Color the Valley LLC is a Queer, BIPOC & Women-Owned outdoor guiding company based in Burlington, Vermont. They specialize in bikepacking, backpacking, and hiking trips with an emphasis on Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) and Queer communities.
RAR Champlain Valley is a regional chapter of Radical Adventure Riders (RAR), which encompasses the Adirondacks, NY and Northern, VT. RAR creates networks and programs to support femme, trans, women, non-binary folks and BlPOC folks in the cycling and outdoors scene.
The two groups are working together to provide build a community gear library and to have gear to help facilitate trips for their communities.
A coalition of bicyclists representing four grassroots groups rooted in the Southern California region. This coalition works to create access and cultivate community connectedness in their neighborhoods through bicycling, social…
Ariel is based in Austin, TX and dove headfirst into bikepacking in 2022. He is a co-leader and volunteer coordinator of Black History Bike Ride, a ride leader and safety officer at Bikes or Death and spends his time collaborating with non-profits and other BIPOC organizations around the country to provide leadership and community organizing experience.
We are thrilled to support Ariel as he builds up a gear library to begin hosting a range of beginner to intermediate trips locally in Austin, as well as collaborating with others in Texas to lead trips so that more leaders can be empowered to create spaces for people to learn about and experience bikepacking.
Founded in 2019 as the flagship program of Black Transcendence, Black Trans Bike Experience (BTBE) has grown into a Black, Trans, Womanist, and emergent community. The vision of BTBE is threefold:
1) to strengthen connections between Black, trans & queer people and their broader communities,
2) to celebrate & affirm growing Black youth, Black women, & Black Trans people, and
3) to demystify and increase access to the multi-faceted activity/sport of biking as a way to grow a lifelong sense of belonging in bike-healthy communities, and the cycling industry at large.
We’re grateful for the opportunity to support BTBE as they develop a local gear library to lead trips for the community.
Xanich is is an emerging tribe nurturing land through an indigenous lens of reciprocity & gratitude. Members of Xanich have come together to conserve and enhance flora, fauna, land and collective biographies for future generations. Their tribe is intergenerational, they represent various places across Abya Yala and the world, and their gender and sexuality expression is rich with diversity. Xanich is starting a gear lending library with plans to offer two branches of bikepacking tours, Spirit Bicycle Runs and Educational Metal Buffalo Journeys.
Wild Wolf Cycling Collective (WWCC) is an intentional space for women and gender-expansive riders in Los Angeles County and surrounding communities, focused on expanding pedal-powered access to the outdoors and nature. Given that Los Angeles is a diverse city with primarily BIPOC residents, WWCC strives to center the leadership and vision of BIPOC women and gender-expansive folks to address the historical harm that has excluded these riders and contributed to the “nature gap”—a phenomenon where BIPOC residents have had the least access to nature, including parks and preserves. By offering low-to-no cost entry into the world of bikepacking, WWCC continues to build community and create opportunities to access natural spaces via bicycle. We’re delighted to support WWCC in adding bikes to their extensive gear library, removing the largest cost barrier, enabling them to offer programming at no cost to the most marginalized riders in their community.