Hadas Madrinas en Bici Programming Guide

I am very proud and excited to present the Hadas Madrinas en Bici (Fairy Godmothers on Bike) Programming Guide. This is a programming guide to the big sister/little sister program stared by the Carishina en Bici collective in Quito Ecuador. This past summer, with the help with a grant from the Davis Projects for Peace Foundation, I was able to return to Quito to help work with this project, and I am really proud of what Carishina en Bici has created. This guide is intended for any type of organization/collective/non-profit/group of friends who sees a need in their community to mentor inexperienced cyclists, and is looking for a structure or an idea of how to fill that need.

The basic idea of the program is to pair together one experienced big-sister cyclist with an inexperienced (ranging from no experience on a bike to recreational biker) little sister cyclist. Ideally they will live in similar parts of the city and will work together weekly on everything from learning how to ride a bike to learning how use their bike as a form of transportation. All you need is some time, volunteers, and people who want to learn!

In the guide I wrote about how we have organized this project, but there are many ways to organize this, and we would love to answer questions and hear your feedback. We treat this project as a constant work in progress, and we’re always working to improve the structure. So far this project has had some pretty incredible results, and created many more confident female cyclists in Quito. We think that working in pairs creates a sustainable, decentralized project that can be replicated in a variety of contexts.

Please help spread the word, and circulate the guide to anyone you know who might be interested!

Hadas Madrinas Guide english

Video by LaPulgada of El Sur en Bici, Quito, Ecuador

This last summer I made a video and wrote a blog post about the geography of Quito. I talked a bit about how a mountain in the middle of Quito acts as both a physical and social barrier between the north and the south.  In the past a lot of bike organizing in Quito was concentrated in Northern Quito, but in the last year a new collective called El Sur en Bici (The South by Bike) have been organizing a variety of events around biking. They organize rides, bike polo, and alley-cats always with an eye to being as inclusive across race, gender, age, and class as possible. They are an awesome group doing amazing organizing to help bridge the geographic gap in bike organizing in Quito. This video shows off what they are doing, and how much fun they’re having.