P4P/SP 2024 Annual Report: 10/01/2023 to 09/30/2024

Pedals for Progress, a New Jersey nonprofit corporation, empowers sustainable economic development by recycling bicycles and sewing machines from the U.S. and shipping them to motivated people in the developing world. Pedals for Progress (P4P) is a nonprofit charity incorporated under the laws of New Jersey and registered with the Internal Revenue Service as a tax-exempt charity under section 501(c)(3) of the federal tax code (EIN: 22-3122003). A ten-member unpaid board of trustees oversees a paid staff of 2 and a network of hundreds of volunteers.

2024 HIGHLIGHTS

Pedals for Progress shipped 4 containers and 4 LCL (Less than Container Load) shipments for a total of 1,805 bicycles, and 406 sewing machines, to 6 nonprofit agency partners in 6 developing countries. This brings cumulative donations shipped since 1991 to 166,737 bicycles, 6,579 sewing machines.

We concentrated our collection operations within the New York City and Philadelphia suburbs increasing our efficiency. Our bicycle and sewing machine collections were sponsored by 31 community partners in five states.

2024 Shipments

Recipients of Fiscal 2024 Bicycle Container Shipments

Absolute Bikes Tirana, Tirana, Albania (450 Bikes and 50 Sewing Machines)
Association Défi et Révolution de la Vie Rural (DRVR), Togo (496 bicycles and 20 sewing machines)
God Cares Outreach (P4P-Belize), Belize City, Belize (404 bicycles and 25 sewing machines)
Kola Nut Producers Association/SlowFood Sierra Leone, Free Town, Sierra Leone (455 Bikes and 65 Sewing Machines)

Started the year 10/1/23 with 320 bicycles in inventory.

Ended the year 9/30/24 with 119 bicycles remaining in inventory.

2024 Total Shipped: 1,805, Total Collected: 1,604

Bicycle Shipments by Region

	Fiscal 2024	Fiscal 2023
Africa	53%	18%
Asia	0%	0%
Central America	22%	82%
Eastern Europe	25%	0%

Recipients of Fiscal 2024 Sewing Machine LCL Shipments

Village Care Initiatives (30 sewing machines)
Mityana Open Troop Foundation, Uganda (144 sewing machines)
Chief Promotions, Tanzania (72 sewing machines)
P4P container shipments – 160 sewing machines (see above)

Started the year 10/1/23 with 221 sewing machines in inventory.

Ended the year 9/30/24 with 252 sewing machines in inventory.

2024 Total Shipped: 406, 2023 Total Collected: 437

Sewing Machines Shipments by Region

	Fiscal 2024	Fiscal 2023
Africa	82%	63%
Asia	0%	0%
Central America	6%	37%
Eastern Europe	12%	0%

OVERSEAS PARTNERS

During the year, Pedals for Progress continued to serve our smaller reliable partners for the majority of our shipments with the addition of three newer programs.

The most critical factors in creating a sustainable, self-financing partnership are shipping costs and effective administration by our overseas partners. We currently consider 4 partnerships as sustainable, i.e., capable of paying for successive shipments: Belize, Guatemala, Togo, and Uganda. Experience has proven that when the shipping costs are at or below $15 per bike or $10 per sewing machine, with good management, this cost is low enough to sustain a self-financing partnership. Without charitable donations, grants or other funding, Pedals for Progress is limited to working primarily in Central America and the Caribbean, while Africa and Eastern Europe require subsidies to pay their higher shipping costs. Overseas distribution success is determined by per unit cost. Landlocked countries remain beyond our reach due to excessive inland transportation costs. Domestic shipping is also expensive; our domestic inland trucking costs to get shipments to port have more than doubled in the last five years.

While our primary goal is to supply environmentally sound transportation to communities and stimulate the greater movement of goods and services, our partners often generate extra funds from the bikes we ship them. These windfall funds, in turn, finance a breadth of community development activities.

Still, we are hopeful that other partner organizations, including some that did not receive bikes in 2024, will pay all or most expenses for new shipments in fiscal 2025, or subsidies will be found to initiate new programs.

CONTINUING PARTNERS

Guatemala: Fundación Integral de Desarrollo Sostenible y Medio Oriente (FIDESMA), San Andrés Itzapa, Chimaltenango *active, but did not receive shipments in FY24*
Togo: Association Défi et Révolution de la Vie Rurale (DRVR), Vogan
Uganda: The Mityana Open Troop Foundation, Mityana
Belize: P4P/Belize, Belize City

NEW PARTNERS 2024

P4P was able to take on several new partners in FY24. Special attention was given to maintain current partnerships that needed increased focus to help them regroup costs due to ripple effects of the pandemic in FY23. With the prospect of expanding our partnerships for FY24 we added these new partners:

Albania: Absolute Bikes Tirana, Tirana
Sierra Leone: SlowFood Sierra Leone, Freetown
Sierra Leone: Village Care Initiatives, Freetown (Sewing Peace)
Tanzania: Chief Promotions, Dar es Salaam (Sewing Peace)

We’d like to welcome these new programs to Pedals for Progress/Sewing Peace.

FINANCES

2024 was a great year for Pedals for Progress finances. We started fiscal 2024 in a good financial position with a strong balance sheet. Our operating income relies on four primary income streams: cash donations with bikes and sewing machines, cash donations from the twice-annual solicitation, corporate donations, and revolving funds and fees from our international partners. Solicitations were better than previous year, with larger donations from a couple long-term supporters helping us meet our solicitation goals. Most notably, we received a one-time individual donation that was well above our all time high. We’d like to thank Mrs. Siebel for her contribution.

Direct corporate donations have been decreasing over the past twenty years due to a focus on employee matching programs. Our sustaining international partners are expected to reimburse Pedals for Progress for the cost of containers or LCL shipments. These are categorized as “revolving funds”: the partners save income to pay for successive shipments. This category met expectations as the number of containers shipped to sustaining partners met the plan. Overall, 2024 operating income exceeded budget.

Operating expenses include four large categories: employee and officers’ compensation, shipping and packing, collections expenses, and office rent. Shipping and packing expenses continue to remain high largely due to the increased cost of shipping and fuel. Collection expenses, office rent, and all remaining minor expenses categories met expectations.

P4P in 2024 had a few extraordinary items. P4P has a conservative investment policy. 2024 was a good period for stocks, bonds, and mutual funds as they generally increased in value. These generated other income for P4P as did some of the stock donations.

Overall, 2024 exceeded financial expectations for P4P.

CORPORATE AND IN-KIND DONORS

FedEx continues to deliver to New Jersey, at no cost, the bicycles collected by the Green Mountain Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, based in Burlington, Vermont.

Union Township Recreation, at no cost, donated Soccer balls that were included in our shipment to Sierra Leone.

Mavis in Califon, at no cost, donated trucking maintenance.

Thank you to the many corporations that participate through matching gifts.

We are very thankful for the support of these organizations and the recognition they have given us.

KEY VOLUNTEERS

Pedals for Progress depends on the efforts of volunteers, several hundred of them, to publicize and work collections, prep bikes for shipping, help us warehouse bikes, and eventually load them into containers bound for our partner agencies overseas.

A special thanks to Michael Sabrio for managing at bike collections and maintaing Webmaster duties; Maureen Greenbaum for aiding in online advertisements and expansion efforts. We thank our Tinkerers Dennis Smyth, Paul Lemaire and Mary O’Brien for their excellent work refurbishing many of the sewing machines we ship.

Thank you to Joanne Heidkamp, Paul Demers, Bob Thompson, and Mary O’Brien for leading, organizing, and executing bicycle and sewing machine procurement throughout the state of Vermont. We would also like to thank Joanne for helping introduce our new twice a year collectors meetings.

We especially thank these collectors:

Jerry Agasar with the Newtown Rotary Club: 119 bikes and 21 sewing machines

Casey Walsh with Faith Lutheran Church: 64 bikes and 13 sewing machines

Christine Potts and John Greenberg with St. John’s Episcopal Church: 192 bikes and 11 sewing machines

Daryl Detrick with the Warren Hills HS Computer Science Club: 154 bikes and 64 sewing machines

David Hanrahan and Alicia Fichera with the Vineland Rotary Club and DNS Solutions: 97 bikes and 20 sewing machines.

Colin Purcell and the Christian Brothers Academy: 121 bikes and 10 sewing machines

PROGRAM CHALLENGES

Pedals for Progress began the year on a strong and positive note and we were able to maintain strong financial standing. We still faced challenges stemming from rippling effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic, particularly inflation, and increased prices of gasoline and shipping.

Pedals for Progress has been able to maintain a very slim employee base after the full transition of leadership mentioned in our last fiscal year but still face the need to fundraise for support.

The bicycles collected this year continue to be the highest quality bikes that we have ever collected. The most common brand name was Trek and we collected over 80% mountain bikes in the adult bike category. The vast majority of bikes we collected were originally sold in a bike shop for a relatively high price.

Our spring collection season, while historically very strong, has continued to diminish in success. Our fall collections season is greatly improving and now considered our strong season. The decrease in collection totals for our spring collections season is unknown as sponsorship remained on par with FY23. As we are reliant on the success of collections to keep us financially active, we had to rely heavily on our summer solicitation to help us keep up with our added salary line and general operations.

Encouraging pre-collection efforts with our sponsors continues to be a challenge mostly due to storage restraints on smaller clubs. We hope to find solutions to make drop offs easier for donors. We hope to improve collection efforts by working more closely with our collection sponsors on advertisement and pre-collection efforts.

P4P was fortunate to receive a large one-time donation this spring that further helped our program with decreased bicycle donations felt this spring. This highlights the need for increased individual donations and the importance of fundraising efforts outside our collection efforts.

Pedals for Progress developed partnerships worldwide to diversify relationships and reduce the risk of events in one country or region negatively affecting our operations. Since reduction of transportation costs is doubtful, we are seeking sponsorships to supplement our African and other high cost partnerships. Partner programs in Central America, which have a landed cost of under $15 per bike, are successful financially and require no further subsidies to continue shipments. P4P inland partners in Eastern Europe and Africa will fail without financial support. International shipping costs in these regions run from $16 per bike on the coast to as high as $38 inland (Uganda).

Shipping the sewing machines within bicycles shipments makes the delivery of these heavy objects affordable. However, our bicycle partners need relatively few sewing machines. The challenge is to find the funding to deliver machines to small sewing programs like the Mityana Open Troop Foundation in Uganda or to get them delivered very inexpensively. Most new sewing projects require only two pallets of machines. Due to that low volume, initial shipments were previously shipped via air freight, which is very expensive. P4P developed in 2013 the capacity to ship by boat individual pallets of sewing machines at a very reasonable cost. This low-cost shipping allows us to expand our small standalone sewing machine projects globally.

GOALS FOR 2025

During fiscal 2024, Pedals for Progress plans to ship approximately 3,000 bicycles and 500 sewing machines. Collection sites where we send our personnel will be limited to the greater suburbs of New York and Philadelphia. Bicycles collected outside this region need to be delivered to our New Jersey warehouse by the collection sponsors. We aim to add many more collections sponsors to help us meet these expected goals. We encourage interested individuals or groups to reach out to us to inquire about sponsoring a collection.

Pedals for Progress challenges continue to be financial, not supply-side driven. With more funding, we can collect significantly more bikes within our current footprint and initiate more programs internationally. Increasing production requires more staff for attending potential collections and more vehicles on the road. The operational costs of producing the bicycles and sewing machines are significant. P4P is unable to accept bicycles without an accompanying cash donation; this limits production. Our collection efforts that produce the product we deliver. In many ways, you can think of P4P as a trucking company. Every trip in the truck produces more bicycles and sewing machines, our products. These products make the difference globally by helping people in need help themselves.

2024 Board of Trustees

Jamie Acosta
Jerry Agasar
John Alexander, Chair
Daryl Detrick
David Schweidenback, treasurer and VP, International Programs
Alan Schultz, President
Casey Walsh
Andrew Williams
Thomas Beishke
Ryan Saul, secretary

STAFF

Alan Schultz, President
David Schweidenback, Vice President, International Programs and Founder
Michael Sabrio, Webmaster
Robert Delghiaccio, Warehouseman
Otto Hintz, Warehouseman
Evan Vaccarella, Warehouseman
Joel Ortega. Warehouseman
Paul Salvetti, Warehouseman

Further information about Pedals for Progress is available at www.p4p.org. This includes our financial statements, IRS Form 990s, and information about our 501(c)(3) nonprofit tax-exempt status.

To receive our newsletters or information on how to collect bikes and/or sewing machines, contact alan@p4p.org. To request a donation of a container of bicycles or sewing machines, contact Dave at dschweidenback@gmail.com

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