01/20/2026
Optimism isn’t a personality trait, it’s a process. It requires effort and maintenance. Sometimes, that process seems futile or impossible to perfect, affecting your ability to hope for something better.
Hope comes in a lot of forms, though. For us, it came in the form of our friends at Apple Autos offering to lend us a truck to help with bike collection last fall, and later offering to let us keep it all season for whatever we needed. They wrapped it for us, handling the design work as well. When we saw “This truck delivers hope” on the side, we answered with a “Heck yeah it does” and got to work. We were able to adapt our model, delivering bikes to our distribution partners, new and old alike, and holding giveaway events in their communities instead of a single giveaway day at our warehouse.
That little tweak to how we do things put bikes within a shorter reach of the people who needed them. No trip to our warehouse for hundreds of working families. No signing their kids up for giveaway day, making promises, and having to break them because you got called into work, the car died, or someone got sick. Kids, bikes, happiness. That’s the hope we were able to deliver this season. It’s a narrow lane, but we gave everything we could to fill it.
When we say “we”, we don’t mean just our staff or our board. What we mean when we say “we” is the thousands of Minnesotan volunteers who gave their time and talents to get the bikes ready and to help us put kids on them. Those volunteers are the reason we exist. They don’t just deliver hope, they’re hope personified.
Go deliver the hope you can, whether it’s small or large, whether or not you think it’ll make a difference given the challenges you’re up against. A few thousand committed Minnesotans can do anything they put their minds to.
