Keeping The Fire Alive
By: Myles Delfin
Tags: Cycling, Social Good, Community, Disaster Response, Social Media

It’s the last 12 months of a two-year push to roll-out The Bike Scouts Project at a scale that allows it to do what it was designed for — to give people a place to come together as a community and passionately change the world around them in a very human way.

Starting in 2013 with a crowdsourced idea for a Volunteer Bicycle Messenger service that provided an alternative means of communication and supply for people that were isolated by Typhoon Yolanda. In six years, the Bike Scouts grew from that simple idea into a social platform for people who believe in the difference that a genuinely-involved community can make.

A lot of people think that The Bike Scouts Project is about chasing after a goal, and it’s probably why a lot of people are always concerned about what it will do tomorrow, the next week, or the next month. What nobody understands is that The Bike Scouts Project is not meant to attain a goal — it is meant to exist.

The work and the unimaginable sacrifice that has gone into building the Bike Scouts for the past six years hasn’t been to chase after a goal. Everything has been about building something that will outlast all of its builders, designers, doubters, and its believers. It’s why it has been challenging, and it’s the reason why it isn’t as simple as what most would like it to be.

The real benefit of the Bike Scouts is its foundation. It isn’t just the technology that makes the community possible, it’s not about programs or goals, the bedrock of the Bike Scouts is its unseen architecture. The Bike Scouts community is built on an actual achievement, everything about it is based on the actual practice of what it stands for.

You can strip away the technology, engagement, data, marketing, and the branding of the Bike Scouts and you will end up with a genuine core that stands on its own value. The Bike Scouts Project is about people, it’s about the belief that there is inherent good in everyone, and that a community that believes in that good can generate the drive to bring out a better version of ourselves as human beings.

It sounds too idealistic, of course, if only it isn’t actually happening every day on a massive scale in a community that’s separated by over 7,000 islands but connected by the belief in a shared sense of humanity. This is what the Bike Scouts community is all about. It won’t look fancy when you see it because we’ve been working on the people side of things, we did the work of building the community. We connected offline before we even started going online, and this is what makes it strong.

Technology provides convenience, and nobody has ever considered that it’s the greatest weakness of connecting with machines and devices. The world is a physical place and there is nothing that will change that — even if we learn to upload ourselves to the web, or the cloud, weather can wipe all of us away with one category five typhoon. We know this because we’ve been there, and when that happens it’s the physical community that will remain.

The Bike Scouts community exists online, it runs on technology, the people that make up the community connect with devices but even if the world goes dark it’s one of the very few communities that will still be online, through a very human network that serves as its foundation. It’s easy to make people like, share, or fill up a survey but proximity and participation alone does not make people neighbors, or actual friends.

You can join a social platform where you can have thousands of virtual friends, or you can sign up for the Bike Scouts community and have fewer friends, though, they will be the kind of friends who will actually show up at your doorstep when you need somebody to ride a bicycle with, or when the strongest typhoon in human history washes away your home and you think there is nobody that will find you. The Bike Scouts will, we are the only community that can actually claim we’ve done it before.

We are Bike Scouts.

Visit us online: bikescouts.org