Featured Volunteer

This month we are switching gears to highlight the other side of our organization that involves seams, thread, bobbins, and stitches. Sarah and Taylor are seen here by a 26 rental truck, which was required for a recent donation of a literal TON of sewing machines! While it's true we could have likely fit all the sewing machines into a smaller rental truck, we were sincerely concerned about the weight of all those machines and opted for a larger truck.

This donation came to us through one of our largest suppliers of donated sewing machines, Otterbein United Methodist Church in Hagerstown. Otterbein has been collecting bikes and sewing machines for us since before we became Bikes for the World over 20 years ago. You may remember last August they helped us load our 1,000th donated sewing machine that ended up going to Costa Rica. 

A few months after that there was some chatter around the water cooler at a local  business where Tom, an Otterbein member, works. His ears perked up when he heard something about a collection of sewing machines. Turns out there was a woman who was a bit of a collector, tinkerer, and refurbisher of old used sewing machines. She had hundreds!

She recently passed away and the family was working to close her estate and was scratching their heads about what to do with her lifetime supply of sewing machines. It was a lot. But they also wanted to honor her life's work and try to find a use for many of these machines. That's where Tom jumped in and suggested Bikes for the World. 

Back in Rockville, we had to prepare for a donation of this size that might sit with us for a while. On average we donate about two to four dozen sewing machines a year. If this was really 200 sewing machines, that's 4-5 years worth! So we cleared some space but also reached out to our partners. Who else might be able to utilize some donated sewing machines!?

Turns out many of our partners! Because so many of our supported projects focus on work that is bigger than just transportation and bikes, sewing machines would be overly welcomed in several of our projects. Many of our partners also focus on empowering and uplifting women and seamstress, is a popular career option in small rural villages. 

We are now busy going through many of these machines to make sure they are safe, repairable, and useful for our beneficiaries. And we will be including many  more sewing machines in our containers heading all over the world in the upcoming months.