Featured Volunteer: Potomac School Summer
This month's Featured Volunteer was a little delayed by design. We want to honor Potomac School Summer even though we are now technically in Fall. And the reason for the delay is we wanted to definitively state that this volunteer group joined us on the HOTTEST day of the year! It was one of those weather alert days this past July when the temperatures were well into the triple digits. We didn't quite hit that in our warehouse, but it was hovering above 95 even in the morning!
During most of the year Bikes for the World relies on our school groups to really keep our shop rolling. Our student volunteers come in and get a crash course in how a bike is put together and what tools they can use to take them apart. Then they break out into small groups around a work stand and start dismantling bikes that aren't in good enough shape to be donated. What we want, is to save all the spare parts that mechanics could use to repair and maintain the bikes we so ship. And our student mechanics do a ton of this work for us.
Over the summer when school is out, we not only lose those school groups but a lot of our individual volunteers go missing as well. That includes our daytime volunteer mechanics and our Thursday night crews because so many people are traveling and on vacation during the summer months. More recently, we have several summer camps schedule sessions with us in June and July. Unfortunately for them, that tends to also be the hottest time in the warehouse!
Even though we mostly lucked out on our summer loading schedule by somehow avoiding those hottest of hot days. That wasn't the case for our Summer Camps. Landon Summer and Potomac School Summer both landed in the warehouse on those days when the weather maps were some color beyond fuchsia. And they all worked hard, without complaint.
And this crew from Potomac Summer, it turned out, was even more important than we could have imagined. They helped us get ready for our container that was heading to Village Bicycle Project Ghana in July. We didn't know then how much trouble that container was going to be. Having those volunteers hard at work in the shop earlier in the week took the stress of getting parts together for the shipment off our minds. So when the stress of having the wrong container delivered at the end of the week hit, we were ready for it! In case you forget, you can read about that shipment here.
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