...and with this, I am straight up asking you to support Ride for Reading with your wallet. Yeah, books are important, volunteers are important, but there are always costs, and a little can go a long way. To make it easier on you, and harder on me, you can make a donation per mile I ride, or just throw down a pile of money without making me do math for all 2745 miles and 200,000 feet of climbing, from Banff Alberta Canada to Antelope Wells New Mexico, off road, through the Rockies.
...just so you know, a nickel per mile is about $130.
100% of your tax deductible donation goes to Ride for Reading.
All of it.
I'm not taking one penny.
Click here to make your donation.
If you need more persuasion, keep on reading, because you can.
So why the hell should you pony up your hard earned cash?
Reading is a fundamental tool of life, much like fire. We didn't always have fire, and when we didn't, it probably wasn't an uncommon occurrence to wake up to the screams of your bed buddy being dragged from the pile o' slumber for an evening treat. Reading is just as important. If you don’t know how to read, then how do you decipher the hieroglyphics warning you about the beast in that cave you’re planning to move you and the Frankenbrow clan into this afternoon? You can’t decipher them because you can't read, so you’re lunch. But we don't have to worry about those carnivorous, Bic lighters are everywhere.
Unfortunately illiterate children and adults are as well.
Who knows what brilliant and beautiful minds have never been unlocked from the blindness of what might as well be blank pages staring them in the face every time they crack a spine. With only one age appropriate book for every three hundred American children, fostering the fundamentals and building the skills to digest literature, schematics, or even street signs is becoming more and more difficult every day. The loss of potential is staggering, and education on a whole is suffering.
Ride for Reading is changing this. Their mission is helping children in low-income areas become healthy and literate. What started in a living room in Nashville Tennessee has grown into an energized and passionate behemoth of hundreds of cyclists literally handing a brighter future to underprivileged children. In just the last few years, Ride for Reading, along with local volunteers, have placed more than 120,000 books into the excited hands and imaginative minds of children throughout the United States, and we’re just getting started. During Ride for Reading week, we will have nearly 1,000 volunteers in 32 cities and 16 states donating almost 60,000 books in just a few days.
Check it out.
You do understand, right? Free books, personally delivered to children from people in their community, and it is all done on bicycles.
Don't forget the bicycle advocacy element.
You see, every time a volunteer helps a child choose their book, this child is having a healthy, positive interaction with a local cyclist. They are sharing this experience with a volunteer that is investing in their community through these children, and this person is showing them that we, as a collective group of cyclists, truly care and believe in them and in their potential. We know that this one book can be the first steps toward a path that leads to great success, not only as a real, tangible investment into the future of the local community, it is also the most astounding and beautiful cycling advocacy I have ever witnessed in my life...
because one day they will be the one behind the wheel of the car passing you.
Here again is the link where you can make a donation to Ride for Reading.
Thanks in advance, that is unless you do nothing.
