Bike for Good: the social enterprise getting Glasgow cycling

Bike for Good is one of several organisations working towards the Scottish government's target of making 10 per cent of journeys by bike by 2020

Bike for Good's community hub, which opened on Victoria Road on the southside of Glasgow in May 2017 (BFG)

The photos of women cycling were only meant to stay up on the walls of the Bike for Good community hub in Govanhill, Glasgow, temporarily.

Staff had gathered portraits on two separate shoots around the city for International Women’s Day.

At a launch 10 March, people gathered for a party to unveil the portraits. They proved so popular, it was hard to take them down. Women of all shapes and sizes grinned from the walls on their bikes: Muslim women with headscarves tucked under helmets, mothers with children strapped on child seats. Most were wearing wet-weather gear. This is Glasgow, after all.

“So many people engaged with these portraits,” says Shgufta Anwar, a development officer for Bike for Good, a social enterprise that gets people cycling. “I think they were so popular because we’re trying to normalise women on bikes in the area and it isn’t the norm, at the moment.”

Anwar runs many of the programmes out of Bike For Good’s community hub, which opened in May last year on Victoria Road on Glasgow’s Southside. The organisation was founded by Greg Kinsman-Chauvet after he learned to ride a bike aged 30 and found it to be a life-changing experience. He liked cycling so much he moved to Glasgow, sold his car and quit his job to volunteer.

The charity arm of Bike for Good started with a small stall in Barras Market in July 2010, teaching people the mechanics of the bike and how to cycle safely. It has since expanded to include a social enterprise that makes money refurbishing bikes and selling them on. Anything that can’t be used is stripped and sold on as parts, to stop as many bikes and parts as possible from going to landfill.

Bike for Good now employs more than 50 people. It is one of several cycling organisations in Glasgow working to meet the Scottish government’s target: for bikes to be used for 10 per cent of journeys made by 2020, up from the current figure of 2 per cent. (As things are, hitting that target will take 350 years.)

But there are positive signs on the front line. The Southside branch of Bike for Good is already outgrowing its premises and looking to relocate to somewhere larger. The main reason it needs more space? More bikes. For most, the key barrier to cycling is not owning a bicycle. Nextbike, a rental city bike scheme, offers over 500 bikes at 63 stations across the city for an annual fee of £60. This is too pricey for many. So Bike for Good joined with other cycling organisations in the city to offer loan bikes for £3 to refugees and other communities on Southside. It tops up the Nextbike supply with its own refurbished loan bikes, which have grown in number from 10 to more than 40.

“For some people £60 is nothing, but for some people £60 is everything,” says Anwar. Then there are other barriers. Some people live or work far from the bike stations, others don’t have a smartphone to make the rental or good enough English to understand the process. Bike for Good worked with the other cycle groups to find interpreters to speak to potential cyclists. They welcome newcomers into the Southside hub to hire the bikes, rather than forcing people to sign up on the phone. The work is ongoing. In its first phase of the project, surveys showed some people without financial barriers were taking the cheaper bikes. Now they are looking at targeting specific groups.

“We’re also running training because a lot of people lack confidence on the roads,” says Anwar. “It’s not just, ‘Here’s a bike, off you go’, it’s support for them as well.”

Govanhill is the most diverse neighbourhood of Scotland, with more than 50 languages spoken across just 13 housing blocks. It is also the focus of the South City Way, a £6.5m investment by the Scottish government into improved cycle paths to connect different parts of the city and promote cycling as an environmentally friendly, healthy activity. Anwar and the Bike for Good team now have a big job on their hands: to encourage the diverse communities of Govanhill to believe that cycling is for them.

“One particular culture barrier we had was clothing. People don’t want to wear Lycra, they want to be able to cycle in whatever they wear,” says Anwar. Most of the Bike for Good fleet are step-through bikes with a low bar. “The ladies love these bikes, particularly for the Muslim and Asian communities because they’re wearing something a bit looser and longer on their figure.”

Pedal Pathways, Bike for Good’s cycling group aimed at women, has now worked with more than 200 women from across Glasgow. Sixty per cent of those surveyed said their health and wellbeing had improved thanks to the sessions, which can include yoga, bike maintenance, healthy food and, of course, a bike ride.

“The majority of people that come into us with barriers are ladies,” Anwar says. “Some of them are estranged, some of them are not talking to anyone other than their family members, or they’re migrants, they might have been through horrific experiences. The social aspect is really important.”

For some of these communities, cycling is something people do if they can’t drive, Anwar says. “People say, ‘Now we have cars, why would you cycle?’” she says. “So you have to get them to think of the health aspect and the environment aspect. It’s about getting people to realise that at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what you look like, you’re all the same underneath and you’re there for a common purpose, which is to ride a bike.”