Your generosity has been amazing. Thank you everyone who contributed
In just under two weeks, you have helped us raise $877 for the cost of bike mechanic school this Summer for Kashif, our intern this past year. Kashif is signed up and ready to attend the two-week program in August and he is eager to learn. When he returns, he starts school at Berkeley City College. His long term goal is to open a bike and art shop.
We are thanking Kashif Asaad for his outstanding volunteer work on behalf of the East Bay Bicycle Coalition this past year In June, Kashif completed a year-long EBBC internship that culminated with his organizing a first-ever Bike to School Day at MetWest High School in Oakland, where he was a senior.
Kashif, the middle child of seven, grew up in Oakland’s East Lake District. He followed an older sister to MetWest, a small, innovative high school that promotes internship-based education. He says he has been interested in bicycles for a long time. He was often the only student to ride a bicycle to school – and kept riding despite having a couple of bicycles stolen from the outside bike racks! During the summer following his sophomore year, he enrolled in a program at Cycles for Change that taught him the fundamentals of being a bike mechanic. That led to an after-school job working at The Bikery on International Boulevard in Oakland.
So when it came time to plan his senior research project, he proposed looking for ways to make Oakland more bike friendly. That quest eventually led him to EBBC’s Program Director, Dave Campbell. Together Dave and Kashif designed an ambitious internship.
“Mine was the biggest project at my school,” Kashif says. “First I surveyed all the students from 11th to 9th grade to see what kind of transportation they used to get to school and what I could change to make them more interested in biking to school.”
Then Kashif organized an EBBC bicycle safety class at his school. He attended Alameda County Transportation Commission meetings to advocate for a bus pass for MetWest students and a better Measure B. “That was pretty nerve wracking getting up in front of 30 elected people!” says Kashif, who describes himself as shy. He did outreach in his community to gain support for bike lanes on East 12th Street and 10th Street. He helped with EBBC’s Measure B campaign. He got his bike-less classmates involved in The Bikery’s Earn A Bike program. And, last but not least, he organized Bike to School Day at MetWest on May 9.
“I really worried that nobody would bike to school,” Kashif says. “But I had people riding all the way from 98th Street to school. The only student at the school who has a car biked to school! That’s something to be proud about. So it was a nice day. It was beautiful day.”
“Kashif has a great passion for bicycling and an innate ability to connect with people about the things he cares about,” says EBBC’s Dave Campbell. “When the task took Kashif to the streets, he really excelled and that’s why we loved working with him-he’s so grounded in his community.”
Kashif graduated from MetWest on June 7. In the Fall, he will attend Berkeley City College, probably to study business. “I want to open a bike shop,” he says, “a bike shop-slash-art shop. I have a lot of friends and family who paint, and I want to support them.”