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THE CITY
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BRISTOL Meet the Volunteer and Member Coordinator at The Bristol Bike Project, Lucia Thompson
I have to be honest, I'm not very good at settling down in a place, I’ve been here for five years. What I like most about Bristol is the variety of off-piste venues and events, and that I can cycle everywhere and there's a river I can swim in. I'm the Volunteer and Member Coordinator at The Bristol Bike Project: my day-to-day is a mixture of meetings with people inside and outside the organisation, strategic thinking and planning and day-to-day tasks. It's always having fingers in many pies.
Bristolians help bring running water to African village Villagers from a remote part of Mozambique have said that a borehole part-funded by generous Bristolians has “changed everything for our village”. When Bongai Munguni, a University of Bristol and University of Cape Town joint PhD scholar, asked Bristol people to help get running water to her village for the first time, they stood up to help in their droves. With £3,500 raised – combined with a small loan and £4,500 of Bongai’s own money, saved from her university stipends – Bongai and her family were able to sink a borehole into the ground and connect hundreds of families to running water for the first time. Until now, the women had to walk two hours a day to fetch water from a dirty stream, carrying 20 litres of water at a time on their heads, often with babies strapped to their backs. Now they not only have safe drinking water but can spend more time harvesting their crop, looking after their children and planning ahead for the village. Bongai is part of Bristol’s School for Policy Studies, where she researches the impact of poverty, particularly on women. As a child, she walked eight hours every day to go to primary school and did her homework by the light of fires in her Mozambique village. The courageous student and human rights advocate will graduate from Bristol and UCT in two years’ time with a PhD from each.
Bristol Bike Project was born in 2008 when two friends returned from their first cycling tour with a new-found love of bikes and a desire to help their community. James Lucas and Colin Fan had identified a need for affordable transport among asylum seekers in Bristol many of whom were struggling to get about the city to make important appointments and received very little support from the government. Having experienced for themselves the freedom a bicycle can bring, the solution became clear: help people get out on two wheels. They put up posters asking for unwanted bicycles, teamed up with Bristol Refugee Rights to spread the word among their members, and within days were spannering away and rehoming spruced up bicycles with delighted new owners.
• Bongai and her village are still welcoming donations to help connect more families to running water and to help finance the school. Donate at: justgiving.com/crowdfunding/community -water
Seeing the new sign up on the front of our Stapleton Road shop entrance was a highlight for me because I know how many meetings, conversations, collaborations, time, love and commitment had gone into making it happen, all on a shoestring and it looks so great!
10 THE BRISTOL MAGAZINE
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MARCH 2022
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We are a comprehensive community bike project, repairing and rehoming unwanted bicycles. We aim to help people from all walks of life get out on two wheels and we empower people within our community by providing access to affordable and sustainable transportation, encouraging an ethos of DIY and DIT (Do It Together!). We also try to strengthen our community by providing a vibrant and supportive workshop environment for people from all backgrounds to come and work alongside one another. The Bristol Bike Project promotes sustainability by saving bicycles and their working parts from landfill and always encourages reuse wherever possible, offering an alternative to buying new.
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This year, we're bringing young people back into the workshop for Friday's After School Bikes drop in, restarting Social Cycle and putting on an Open Day (watch this space) to welcome the local community into the workshop. We're also going to be creating a mural on the wall outside our workshop. I think Baraka Café in Easton deserves a shoutout. It has been providing food for people every week throughout the pandemic, and is run by Esther and a great team. Also Rising Arts Agency is a community of young creatives, mobilising others for radical social, political and cultural change. I’m currently reading To Paradise by Hanya Yangihara – I love her writing. I also just watched Can You Hear Me on Netflix and highly recommend it. If I could have dinner with anyone from any era, I would have dinner with Audre Lorde, an iconic Black lesbian feminist scholar and poet. I would be shy to talk to her but would love to hear her read or in conversation – I am in awe of her work. My philosophy in life is: try to approach everything with love and boundaries. • thebristolbikeproject.org
