When Petar and a group of Gracanica youth applied for bicycles last year as part of a tourism project for their local community, they never thought that within a year they would be using those same bicycles to make deliveries during a global pandemic.
“Last year we were doing bike tourism, but tourism is one of the most affected areas. So, we want to use the bikes another way,” explains Petar, an active young person from Gracanica who has benefitted from USAID-funded youth leadership programs. As part of a local organization in his community, Young Active Gracanica, he put his head together with the other youth members and came up with a plan for using 22 bicycles to connect the people stuck at home with the local producers struggling to sell products. “Our mission is to help people who need products and can’t go out and to help the local producers sell their products. We started out by inviting our volunteers and last week we developed a website.”
Citizens in self-quarantine or with stay-at-home orders can use the online platform to order local products from a variety of local sellers. A volunteer from Young Active Gracanica takes the online order to the food store, restaurant, greenhouse, or even local pharmacy and picks up the requested products. The volunteer then delivers it by bike to the home of the citizen in need.
With 75 volunteers spread throughout the villages of Gracanica, the youth can make deliveries to almost every location in the municipality. The amount they can stuff in a backpack and carry in a basket, however, limits the size of their deliveries. “We are adding new products every day to the website and make about 5-10 deliveries per day. But we cannot handle big deliveries right now, because we do not have bike trailers. We are using city and mountain bikes for delivery,” Petar says. The youth have added baskets to bikes meant for exploring cities and mountains, but Petar hopes they will soon have cargo bikes that can handle deliveries up to 50 kilograms.
The Gracanica youth currently provide the bike delivery service free of charge to both the buyer and the seller, but plan to charge for their services after the crisis ends. As a result of the global pandemic, what started out as one sustainable business model with bikes has turned into another. But what is certain to sustain even after the crisis is the dedication of the Gracanica youth to using their bikes for both social good and the economic growth of their community.
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