Leading rides is almost free! As a chronic ride leader, I do accumulate a few expenses:
- I pay for a premium Ride With GPS subscription so I may add Points of Interest to my routes and share them with riders.
- I make spoke cards for many of my rides and there's some material expenses with those.
- French Toast ingredients are inexpensive but not free.
- Anyone who comes on any of my rides gets a Bicycle Kitty sticker.
- Anyone attending a hill killerz ride gets a hill killerz sticker.
- I make BumEase sitting pillows as prizes for alley cat races and often purchase or collect donated prizes for those events too. (Please get in touch if you have a prize to donate to the July 13th Bicycle Kitty Alley Catty!)
The reason I'm talking about money here is only vaguely related to money. What I really want to talk about is the way our community bolsters me.
I've received donations from private individuals to fund the above expenses. I've received a couple of stipends from the Adventure Cycling Association to create bike overnights. And, most recently, I received a nice "micro grant" from local rad advocacy (radvocacy!) group, BikeLoud PDX.
Receiving this kind of support doesn't just soften those expenses for me. It makes me feel validated as a bike fun curator. It makes me feel seen in a way that is very meaningful to me.
If you have ever enjoyed one of the rides I lead, I encourage you to support these organizations however you see fit. For BikeLoud PDX, it can be as easy as signing up for their email newsletter: https://bikeloudpdx.org/
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