How Can You Make a Difference in a Girl’s Life with a Bike
About twenty years ago, Lotus Outreach International, a San Francisco charity started the program Lotus Pedals to help girls in India and Cambodia to remain in school. Which is the connection between bikes and school?
The girls in that area risk rape or abduction by sex traffickers, therefore many parents prefer to keep their daughters at home rather than exposing them to danger on the daily journey to school.
"Lotus Pedal is a simple intervention but a terrifically effective one," says Erika Keaveney, executive director of Lotus Outreach International, adding, “And donors like it because a one-time gift can make such an enormous, direct difference in one girl’s life.”
Lotus Pedals distributed 500 bikes in Cambodia last year, and Ms. Keaveney says the goal is 2,000 in 2013.
“We have seen how one bicycle is so much more than two wheels,” says Ms. Keaveney. “It is amazing how many Cambodians can fit onto a bike. Our girls often give their siblings or neighbors a ride to school on the handlebars and anywhere else they can hold on, so one bike actually enables multiple kids to get to school.”
This story originally appeared at The Chronicle of Philanthropy.
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