‘Cycling is a force for good. It creates an environment which can solve a lot of social ills.’

‘We believe cycling stands as a symbol of equality, independence and empowerment and these values determine our projects ethos and direction.’

‘We encourage diverse communities in Liverpool City Region to choose cycling by removing barriers.‘

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Cycle of Life’s joined up approach is a new way of working that devolves responsibility to the community and puts it at the heart of the active travel revolution. Local Instructors and mechanics are trained locally at the cycle hub who ideally will be local parents or professionals who live in the community they serve. An active travel consortium including multi agencies eg. Schools/play centres/councillor/ward officer/police/nhs/ community groups/local businesses/ cycle hub instructor/mechanic meet to discuss a shared vision of creating an active travel utopia in their area and reducing the barriers to the community participating. This combined voice is very effective in creating change whether safer school streets, a new pump track, a cycle storage unit or new cycle lanes and infrastructure.
The cycle club is led by local trained leaders and instructors and is frequented by parents and families and diverse groups in the community. These same families are encouraged by the local instructor/leader to cycle to school with their children and to create a community bike bus. That same encouragement and message is reinforced by the school. Families are taught basic maintenance by the hub with mechanics from diverse backgrounds including BAME women and the workshop is available for more technical matters. It is important the instructors/mechanics live/work/shop etc. in the same community and are cycle champions: inspirational yet relatable to the rest of the community. This will remove a lot of the stigma in some (usually) BAME communities.

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Meet the founder

Ibe Hayter
Director

“I enjoyed cycling with my father as a child – it was all about roaming freely and going where you want to go. I tried to pass this on to my own children,” says Cycle of Life’s Ibe Hayter, “but I found that they didn’t enjoy it as much, as there wasn’t a cycling culture in my diverse neighbourhood.
“I trained up and worked as a cycle instructor and ran cycle projects from a Scout group I had set up. I remember one of the instructors I worked alongside at a secondary school telling a young Somali student that she would have to take her headscarf off to put on a helmet or she would not
be allowed to ride. I felt this girl was being forced to choose between her identity and riding a bike, which was unfair in my eyes.”
Ibe continues, “Many of the children we trained at schools lived in my area, although none of the instructors did. After completing the training and receiving the certificates I noticed many children stopped riding. When I enquired why, they informed me that their families did not encourage them, as they felt riding bikes on the road was dangerous. When I spoke to parents they listed many barriers why they would not consider cycling and why they did not encourage their children.” Ibe understood that over the next 10 years it was inevitable that cities would change drastically and
we would no longer be able to rely on cars and public transport to travel but cycling and walking will be the new norm. He realised a radical new approach would be required to tackle the social inequalities in mobility, health, emissions and socio economic status in the city/region as well as the other barriers that prevent people from confidently choosing to cycle.

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