What is Kids Love Bikes?
The Kids Love Bikes program is a youth bicycle education course that was started by Bike Walk Knoxville in 2018.
The goals of Kids Love Bikes are:
1) to develop our participants’ bike safety skills
2) to increase the number of young people in our community riding bikes both for transportation and recreation; and
3) to provide youth with the information they need to maintain their bikes.
We provide this program to children across Knoxville through partnerships with local schools and community organizations like Wesley House Community Center, the YMCA, and the Boys and Girls Club!
We provide certified bike instructors to teach our immersive and dynamic youth bike education program that focuses on bicycle handling, maintenance, and safety. Through our program, not only do we give kids the opportunity to develop their physical and health literacy, but also learn how to challenge themselves, set a goal, and take responsibility and pride in achieving it.
Our full program consists of six 90-minute sessions for kids to practice their bike safety skills and learn about how their bike works. Bike Walk Knoxville instructors and volunteers work to provide individual coaching to ensure these skills are learned correctly and consistently practiced. Upon completion of the class and mastery of the curriculum, participants can earn a new helmet and certificate for a bike from our amazing partners at the Epilepsy Foundation and Kickstand Community Bike Shop!
Why We Do It
We want to provide a program that combines bike education and bike giveaways, striving not only to improve bike safety outcomes for Knoxville youth, but to showcase biking as a fun way to be active and healthy throughout their lives. We have provided this program to a lot of different organizations and have future programs planned with even more. Our partners have seen firsthand how our program can help kids get active, be safe, and have fun! When kids participate in our program, they are learning bike education that can help keep them safe and expand their curiosity and capabilities by developing technical and physical skills. Ultimately, our curriculum prepares kids to bike safely and get active while using the joy of biking to teach and reinforce other important life skills. Our goal is to get more kids riding bikes safely!
Get Involved
Would you be interested in bringing a Kids Love Bikes program to your organization? You can view our Program Information Sheet and our Core Curriculum Outline to learn more about our program philosophy and curriculum. Contact [email protected] with questions.
We are continuously raising funds to support the Kids Love Bikes program; if you would like to make a donation to Bike Walk Knoxville to help support this and other programs, please click the button below.
Our Partners
Without the help of our community partners, we wouldn’t be able to offer classes or provide bikes and helmets to students who participate in and complete our program. Thank you to the City of Knoxville Parks and Recreation Department for providing us with bikes to use during our program and to the Jeff Roth Cycling Foundation for awarding us with a grant to allow us to purchase a small fleet of bikes. Also, thanks to the Epilepsy Foundation for providing helmets for our program.
Special thanks to the Siddiqi Charitable Foundation who has provided a grant to help support a portion of the cost of the program!
We would also like to thank Kickstand Community Bike Shop for providing certificates for free bikes to students who complete our course!