Our USP
Cover your brakes!
What's Different About STA Bikes?
- We come from the 'grassroots', as local parents of children.
- We focus on disadvantage -- aiming to improve the lives of the disadvantaged. A person at disadvantage tends to be multiply disadvantaged, for example, those living on means tested benefits tend also to suffer from worse health problems, housing, poor life chances, and so on.
- We focus on recruiting women, people from ethnic minorities, local parents and other people from the local community, as cycle trainers.
- We do this by creating jobs for the most disadvantaged, and introducing them to cycling -- hopefully taken up as part of everyday life.
- Our aims are long term -- we believe that by recruiting and working with people from the local community, in the long run cycling will be spread to the 'hard to reach' more effectively, (for example, because they will act as effective role models) and cycling expanded proportionally more. We hope to lay the foundations for a lifetime of cycling.
- We work with young children -- starting as young as possible. We do this for many reasons. Young children are keen to cycle, have no preconceptions, and soak up the experience like a sponge. Young children will have that much longer at Primary School in which to learn and develop their skills. Their parents are more involved in their education, have more years to offer of support and encouragement, and often are at a stage in their own lives when they are ready to learn a new skill, or take up a new job.
- We see the involvement of parents as crucial, and run our schemes to enable this to happen.
- We provide all the ingredients we believe are crucial to interesting 'hard to reach' groups in cycling, getting them cycling, and keeping them there. We provide the tools (bikes, and repair of bikes), motivation (literally talking with people, in a place that they feel safe in), information and support, skills (cycle training, lots of encouragement and group solidarity), relevance (role models of people like them, training in a familiar setting, with trainers who are friendly and often 'like them', from the local community, sometimes speaking their language) money (all the training is free), enjoyment - the emphasis is on having fun and building confidence .