Pedallers Push South For Change

Friday, May 11th, 2007

Posted on the Vancouver Courier - March 28th, 2007
By Mark Hasiuk-Staff writer

A local man hopes to turn a cross-continental bike ride into business opportunities for impoverished communities in other countries.

Shawn Smith, a 26-year-old White Rock resident, graduated with a business degree from SFU last year. In October, Smith founded the non-profit organization Agents of Change and has since convinced 23 others to cycle from Vancouver to Tijuana, Mexico to help raise $1 million for microcredit loans in developing countries.

“It spread virally and organically through friends and friends of friends, and random people who found us on the Internet,” he said, noting that most volunteers are university students or recent grads.

Microcredit is a lending system devised in the mid-1970s in which organizations grant small loans to entrepreneurs who lack the collateral needed to deal with banks. The concept was recently lauded by the United Nations, which declared 2005 the International Year of Microcredit.

“Because we are heading towards Mexico, we’ll be focusing a lot of our lending there,” said Smith, although he also hopes to operate in Central America and Africa.

Smith said his organization will kick-start a wide range of business ventures-from $25 loans for a box of apples to be resold in a public market to several hundred dollars for a fledgling furniture manufacturer or tailoring business. After Smith collects enough money, he’ll surf several websites which help entrepreneurs in developing nations find loans from Western countries. With the help of his partners, he’ll pick the small business ideas he wants to support. “I don’t think of microcredit as charity,” he said. “It’s just giving people access to a system that most of us could get at any day if we had a business idea we wanted to start.”

Smith helped found the SFU International Business Association that organizes seminars and public meetings about international development, but he’s never attempted to fundraise on such a grand scale. “It’s basically become a fulltime job that takes 80 hours a week that doesn’t pay me anything.”

Smith and his convoy-including a couple of support vehicles equipped with water, food and camping equipment-will leave the Vancouver Art Gallery May 3 and cycle roughly 100 kilometres a day down the coastline. The itinerary includes fundraising events in Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles with a tentative June 8 arrival date in Tijuana. After a couple days in the sun, Smith and his cohorts will fly or drive back home.

Although many volunteers have business training, they are less familiar with long-distance cycling. “Almost no one in the crew even has a bike,” said Smith, adding that a local sponsor will sell bikes at cost to all participants.

“I have no cycling experience,” laughed volunteer Amy Vandervelde, a recent SFU grad who works as a business analyst for an investment firm. “I’m glad it’s not a competition, because I’m going to learn how to ride a bike in the next month.”

Smith hopes the bike ride will ignite the fundraising campaign, noting that his organization has collected only $8,000 to date.

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