Cycling Without Age Lisbon - The right to wind in your hair

Your donation will help us fund the purchase of more trishaws (bikes) to increase the number of rides per month and help more and more elderly people leave the isolation of their homes, day care centers or nursing homes.

Our goal for 2020 is to purchase new trishaws (adapted bikes). In 2020 we want to train more than 50 volunteers and exceed 1000 bike rides.

The mission of Cycling Without Age is to remove the elderly from the loneliness of their homes and take them for a 30 or 60 minute ride with the help of trained volunteers in our trishaws with the purpose of reintegrating them into their communities. Cycling Without Age adds significant benefits to integrating older people or people with reduced mobility into their local communities, improving their overall well-being, self-esteem and self-confidence.

Through protocols with Nursinh Homes, Day Care Centers, Rehabilitation Clinics and the like, our volunteers will pick up elderly people and people with reduced mobility or other debilitating or health conditioning condition such as dementia or blindness from where they are and take them on a bike ride around town every week.

Cycling Without Age movement is not about bicycles or just about mobility or sustainability. Cycling Without Age is an innovative and new way to look at volunteering, it's about human relationships, generosity to those who don't have access to little life pleasures, it's about doing things slowly and purposefully, and about the stories that inspire us. We believe in the cognitive stimulation of our elders through experiences, leading them to do things that everyone tells them is no longer possible and to take them to places where they thought they could never go again.

VI Desafio Sénior em Alvalade em Setembro de 2019

About the author

The Association currently has protocols with a nursing home in Campo Grande Social, Fundação Ageas and the S. João de Brito Social Center where, through trained volunteers, we take elderly people out for a ride every week. But that's not enough, we need more bicycles to help older people and people with reduced mobility by establishing protocols with more nursing homes, Day Care Centers, Rehabilitation Clinics and similars so that Portuguese families can ride their grandparents, fathers and mothers regularly, behind the wheel of a trishaw. The Radar project in Lisbon has identified in Lisbon over 30,000 elderly (over 65+) living alone and most of them in a situation of significant isolation. This indicator represents a relative weight of 24% of the city's population. It is estimated that by 2026, the city of Lisbon had more than 100,000 inhabitants over the age of 75, almost double that of 2001.

The Cycling Without Age movement was founded in Denmark in 2012 by Ole Kassow. 7 years ago Ole rode a bicycle through a nursing home and noticed a gentleman sitting on a bench with a cane beside him. His first thought was how many people couldn't walk freely in the city today because of their physical limitations and so realized how much he wanted to help them get back on a bike. Ole later went home with a rented rickshaw offering to walk an elderly man around town. It was just an idea, a moment of reflection and a willingness to help that brought the generosity movement to the world.

Budget and due dates

We will use your donations to fund Cycling Without Age operation in Lisbon, ensuring it's continuing work and increasing the elderly access to our trishaws and experiences with our volunteers throughout the year 2020.

Images

Documents

• pedalar_sem_idade_lisboa_ppl_crowdfunding_2019.pdf

  pdf • 20.96 MB