Bikes for Ukraine – Three ways you can get involved in sending bikes to Ukraine

Mikael has now delivered the first 100 bikes to three cities in Ukraine but the need is massive. He has appeals from five other cities and need thousands of bikes. You can see photos from the first delivery trip on the website here: https://bikes4ukraine.org/photos

Here’s how you can get involved.

Main website:
https://bikes4ukraine.org/

Sponsor a Bike Shipment from anywhere in the world
https://bikes4ukraine.org/sponsor

Start a Bike Collection in your European city
https://bikes4ukraine.org/bike-collection

Andelsforeninger i Hovedstaden – og Danmark
https://bikes4ukraine.org/andelsforening

Donate to our GoFundMe
https://gofundme.com/bikes4ukraine

Getting used bikes from Europe to people who need them in Ukraine I want to tell you three ways that you can get involved Hey everybody, Mikael, here. As you might have noticed on the channel and on my Instagram, I have been busy with a nonprofit association

That I started back in April called Bikes4Ukraine.org. Simple goal: getting used bikes from Western Europe to people who need them in Ukraine. I’ve been there twice and on the last trip I delivered the first 100 bikes to people who have an immediate need for these vital tools, these lifelines.

I dropped them off at six different drop off points in three cities in Lviv, in Bucha and in Chernihiv. And I can tell you two things that I learned. Ukrainians are incredibly grateful. When we bring them bikes, they say, thank you,

Thank you for coming to the country as well in the middle of a war. And thank you for bringing bikes and generally just standing with Ukraine. The other thing I have learned is that there is a massive need for more bikes.

I have appeals from five different cities now who have heard of bikes4Ukraine. Over 1000 bikes are on my list and that is my job now, to source these used bikes here in Copenhagen and in Denmark and as well in the rest of Europe.

You’re going to hear more about that in a minute – and get them to Ukraine. The first two trips established a lot of logistics, a lot of contacts. A network of partners has been set up. I got a lot of good people

Working to help us get bikes to Ukraine, but I want to tell you three ways that you can get involved, because this is incredibly important. Bicycles in Ukraine are not just a nice to have little gift for the people in a war zone. I delivered bikes to refugee camps in Lviv,

Gave them to the people there who came from other parts of Ukraine. And there’s 150,000 refugees in Lviv. We gave them these people in these refugee camps and they said, thank you. And you know what? We’re going to use these. We’re going to go shopping. We’re going to job interviews.

The kids are going to ride them and just have fun. We’re going to use them for all the utility purposes that we use bikes here in Denmark, in many other parts of the world. I also dropped off some bikes in the Bucha region in a rural area

Where there’s lots of small towns and lots of villages. People there have a serious need for bikes because there’s a gas shortage. The roads are completely destroyed in many areas. All public transport has ceased to exist, either destroyed by the Russians

Or the bus taken into use by the Ukrainian army for troop transport and all the things they’re doing to defend their country from this invasion. So these social workers in Bucha, who I gave the bikes to, they’re taking the bikes out to vulnerable citizens who can’t make it into town.

They’re bringing them food, medicine, humanitarian aid. Even post – the bikes that I handed them, they are now postal bikes. And these strong women that I met in the Bucha region, I said, You guys okay with these bikes? They said, these are just bikes.

We can use these bikes. I said, What about the winter? We can ride in the winter and we’re not worried about it. They are so geared to helping their fellow citizens and the bicycle is not a foreign concept to these strong people in Ukraine.

The other place I dropped off bikes too was in Chernihiv and I was in an area outside and kind of a suburb to the main city, and it was completely destroyed by Russian fighting in the early days of the war. Still lots of houses bombed.

45,000 houses actually were destroyed in the early days of the war. Lots of vulnerable people out there. I gave bikes to two NGOs who will ride these bikes out, increasing their mobility radius to the vulnerable people in these neighborhoods, getting them food, water, humanitarian aid, medicine, you name it.

And now all of these other cities have been contacting me. A thousand bikes are on my list. And I can tell you something, seriously. I could show up in Ukraine tomorrow with 100,000 bikes. I wish I could – believe me! 100,000 bikes and those bikes would be put into service almost instantly.

Massive need. So three ways for you to get involved. Check out the website link in the description and under Get Involved. First of all, there is a Sponsor a Bike Shipment. I am sourcing used bikes here in Denmark that would otherwise be scrapped.

We scrapped 400,000 bikes a year in Denmark and that has always pissed me off. So I’m trying to get a hold of those bikes and get them to Ukraine. So if you’re somewhere else in the world and you really want to stand with Ukraine, you like bikes in the and bike friendly cities.

You can sponsor a bike shipment with a local fundraiser wherever you are, your group, your association, a bunch of friends, some businesses. Doesn’t matter. If you raise an amount of money that is equal to €5,000, which is what it costs to send a truck to Ukraine from Western Europe.

Then you can sponsor a bike shipment, you’ll get stickers on the bike, saying “a gift from” whoever you are, whatever association you’re from, whatever city you’re from. And we will ship them to Ukraine and the people there will see these stickers and say, Wow, thank you very much.

I’ll travel there myself, hand the bikes off to people who need them and you’ll be able to follow the whole journey on social media, seeing what purpose the bikes will serve in Ukraine. Second thing you can do to get involved if you live in a European city

That has a surplus of bikes, that’s mostly Scandinavia, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, places like that. You can do a bike collection, you can organize it yourself, and if you can gather 150 to 200 bikes from donations from the city, wherever you get the bikes,

Then I can get a truck and drive them to Ukraine. You do all the legwork yourself. You organize it in your local language. You get your citizens activated and involved and passionate about helping Ukraine with bikes. You call me and I’ll get them to Ukraine.

This has a lot of potential for sourcing bikes in many other cities that I don’t have immediate access to. But through my network, we’re already working with about five different municipalities here in Europe who are starting the process for doing bike collections.

Anybody can do it and you can let us know through the website if you want to be involved. All the links are down in the description to the website, to the bike collection to sponsor a bike. Another form of bike collection is something that’s very specific to Copenhagen, Denmark and many other places.

Here in Scandinavia we have many co op associations, a whole bunch of people living together in apartments and they all are part of the same association now on average, every year in Copenhagen, 30 bikes are thrown out from each of all of our backyards. That is a lot of backyards.

That is a lot of bikes that could be going to Ukraine. So I have a link in the description to a page on the website in Danish for you who live in these kind of co-ops, these Andelsforeninger. And you can get your fellow citizens in your association together

And those bikes that are going to be thrown out every single year, they can go to me and then they will go to Ukraine. Check it out. It’s in Danish. Please – here in Copenhagen and in Denmark – spread the word in Danish about that.

The third way that you can support us is quite simple. Donate some money. This is not a simple project and it does require fundraising. So we have a go fund me set up. Some of you have heard this already, but we still need more funding

From all over the world so you can click the link in the description, go to the Go Fund Me site and donate whatever you can today. Now I’ve noticed the Go Fund Me is a really big crowdfunding website. You know, they brag about how big they are.

They don’t have a currency conversion on their website. So all, all the currency I put in was in Danish kroner, assuming that if you went into that website in Spain, it would be euros, if you went in from Canada, it would be Canadian dollars. No, it’s just Danish kroner.

So here’s the pro-tip for currency conversion. 100 Danish kroner is about €12 12 USD, and you can do the rest of the math from there. Please donate today. Get involved if you can. We need bikes to go to Ukraine and we need it to happen as soon as possible.

This project is not a short term thing. There’s going to be a need for bikes well into next year. If not even longer. Stand with Ukraine. Bikes for Ukraine. Please help us get more bikes to the people of Ukraine. Thank you.