Fall 1998 Newsletter
At eight years of age, Beth accompanied her mother Robbie McHardy on a business trip to Philadelphia to attend a national conference on Service Learning. As Beth sat through (in her words) “another boring meeting,” she flipped through the conference program, looking for something – anything! – that sounded more interesting. At the first opportunity Beth guided her mother through the conference center to where Dave Schweidenback was demonstrating how bikes are processed for overseas shipment.
“This is so easy to do. I’ve even had 6 years old Brownies processing bikes,” Dave said. When someone in the audience snickered at the idea, Dave looked around the room for proof! He spotted Beth, and quickly called her to the front of the room to learn how to remove pedals and turn handle bars. She accepted the challenge.
Beth begged her mother to help her organize a collection in Baton Rouge. Three years later in March 1997, Baton Rouge held its first Pedals for Progress collection. Mother and daughter contacted friends in five middle schools and convinced them to hold collections at their schools, all on the same Saturday morning. The 350 bicycles collected that morning were all processed the way Beth had learned in Philadelphia and brought to a central location on the Louisiana State University campus. There Beth and her parents and fellow volunteers were joined by ten players from the LSU football team to pack the bikes into an 18-wheeler for shipment to Rivas, Nicaragua. The afternoon’s work was topped off with pizza and sodas (through the generosity of the Baton Rouge Coca-Cola Bottling Co.).
The most remarkable thing about that first year was the fun that these sixth and seventh graders had getting to know each other. In 1998 they decided to build on that feeling of working together by inviting ALL of the middle schools in Baton Rouge to participate. Beth wrote letters and her mother met with principals from 36 public, private, and parochial schools throughout the city. Twenty schools agreed to participate, providing a cross section of Baton Rouge middle schoolers in terms of types of schools and neighborhood makeup.
All told, 207 volunteers worked during the 1998 Baton Rouge collection, which yielded 398 bikes and $1,445 in donations. Beth’s dad, Gaylord James, who received a grant from Exxon for $1000 toward shipping costs and led the truck packing effort for CESTA in El Salvador, with the aid of all 25 members of the L.S.U. Rugby Team. Beth, her parents, and her eight-year old brother Robert would like to draw in the remaining 16 schools and thus create a citywide effort in a charitable project on which they work together for the benefit of others, rather than in competition.