This blog was submitted by Alberta Bike Swap.
Alberta Bike Swap is North America’s largest one-day bicycle consignment event, attracting people across Alberta, from Winnipeg to Abbotsford to Whitehorse, and even attendees from the United States.
Why would anyone want to support this non-profit event?
Alberta Bike Swap has always been a safe place to buy, sell, and donate bicycles. It’s about transportation security—keeping good bikes in circulation, helping people find an affordable ride, and getting donated bicycles to the people and community organizations that need them most.
But our bike swaps have a few extra gears: we have more than 100 strategic alliances and have developed an operation that brings together technology, engineering, cycling education, sustainability, mentoring, and the circular economy.
Here’s a look at what we do:
- We make exchanging bicycles safer: We designed and copyrighted our proprietary Bicycle Swap Software™, which checks bicycles against bike ownership databases to prevent stolen bikes from entering our events.
- We ensure bikes are safe to ride: We check every single bike for sale at our events for mechanical safety.
- We make events greener: We designed and patented bicycle racks for our Bike Swap events and community use. After all, what’s a green event without somewhere to park your bike?
- We continuously innovate: We solve bottlenecks and work constantly to improve. We’ve designed our processes, worked through growing pains, made more mistakes than you can imagine, and learned a tremendous amount along the way.
- We give bikes another life: We work with several groups to rebuild and distribute donated bicycles to those in need.
- We support and fund legitimate cycling education: We support CAN-BIKE, the standardized cycling education program operated by Cycling Canada. We believe in the 3 Es: Education, Enforcement, and Engineering.
- We share what we know: We mentor the next generation in technology, sustainability, communications, and business.
And who manages all these moving parts? A team of two!
Laura was a woman in tech, and Chris is a professional engineer. Both are retired: Laura mentors, Chris teaches CAN-BIKE as Alberta’s only Master Instructor, and both seem to have missed the memo about retirement being relaxing.
Laura started cycling in the 1960s. Diagnosed with MS while studying pharmacy in 1980, she changed direction and entered computer science after recovering from blindness and an MS coma, navigating all the terrifying uncertainty that a life-changing diagnosis brings. In the early 1980s, she was one of only three women in her computer science program. Cycling and staying active, physically and mentally, have remained vital parts of her life.
We founded our events to support safe cycling, and we care deeply about recognized cycling education—which is more relevant than ever with the surge in cyclists and the rise of e-bikes. Chris teaches CAN-BIKE because people deserve sound, standardized instruction—not credentials that are self-validated and sadly, well funded. Those cyclists riding unsafely on the sidewalk? Yeah, that’s not CAN-BIKE, and that’s not what he teaches. Alberta needs more certified CAN-BIKE cycling instructors.
From our kitchen table, Laura and Chris designed the software, patented the bike racks, developed the processes, built the strategic alliances, and continue to manage the operations for every event.
The events themselves are powered by nearly 200 amazing volunteers. Our volunteer waiting list fills within 48 hours of registration opening in mid-March!
But the planning, technology, marketing, logistics, strategic alliances, and everything that happens before the doors open? That’s still just a team of two.
We’ve funded our events, software, computer equipment, bike racks, donated-bike rebuilding, cycling education, and everything else using our work salaries in the beginning and now our OAS and RRSPs. We’ve never won a grant—having just received our 57th rejection notice. Do we lose grants because people want a charitable tax receipt? We are problem solvers, and while we don’t have all the answers, we will always choose to help others through our non-profit. We believe that doing good shouldn’t depend on a tax receipt.
We’ve kept the swaps going despite a job transfer to Mexico, spondylolisthesis, a total knee replacement, and a double bypass. We have a fairly stubborn track record of finding a way to make things happen!
But we need to be realistic. We didn’t expect Alberta Bike Swap to grow this large when we put our first event on in 2011, and we made a mistake: we never created a succession plan.
So, what’s next?
We have built something bigger than we ever imagined. We have added one bicycle, one strategic alliance, and solved one problem at a time. Now, we’d love some help with the next stage.
Whether you are interested in corporate sponsorship, helping us build a sustainable succession plan, or simply believe that affordable bicycles, safer cycling, and community are worth supporting, we need your voice and expertise.
We started with bicycles, but this has always been about helping people. The bicycles are what you see. The community is what we built.
Want to help us build the future of Alberta Bike Swap? Visit us at https://albertabikeswap.ca/or reach out directly at [email protected] to start the conversation.
