Bike Scouts

Problems like the climate crisis and the disasters they cause (and will continue to cause in the future) are a global challenge but their impact and the best solutions for them are always local.  Sustainability and the protection of ecosystems is a task that requires the participation of people and communities in order to have scale, but more importantly to become a part of culture that makes the practice of sustainability - sustainable and realistic. We’ve been building a platform for social teamwork that has been making community-driven solutions possible at scale and for the long term. Global problems have local impact, and by shifting the focal point of the solution to people and communities through a social platform - the scale of participation that’s needed, the commercial support to make it possible, and the political will to make it official will follow - we’ve seen this happen in the past eight years.

Bike Scouts provides the 74% of the Philippine population (75% of those affected by disasters globally are from the Asia Pacific Region) that are vulnerable to climate-change-driven disasters a way to act as their own network of support in mitigating local causes of climate change and for generating help in the aftermath of disaster events. Right now, there is no specific platform where people can help provide the scale and quality of participation that climate change or sustainability solutions need. Traditional social media is not designed to handle this kind of engagement which is why real-world problems often end up as content competing with travel, fashion, food and entertainment - even in the midst of category-5 typhoons, volcanic eruptions, or the global pandemic. People want to be entertained on traditional social media, but a majority of people are also looking for purpose and genuine social relevance that we can help channel into support for things that really matter. 

Bike Scouts is a social platform for doing good where everyone can be a part of a network of global support for local ideas and solutions. We turn participation into a social experience where the shared skills, knowledge, and resources make creative solutions to local problems possible. Bike Scouts puts social connectivity to good use by providing scale and a global network of support for sustainability, climate crisis mitigation, and resilience.

The Bike Scouts platform serves as a network of support for people that are vulnerable to the impact of climate change and climate change-driven disasters and a platform for those that want to be involved in turning local solutions into reality through the sharing of skills, knowledge, experience, and resources. In the Philippines, 60% of the landscape is prone to disaster impact and 74% of the population are vulnerable in various ways to disasters and climate change. In addition, 75% of those that are affected by disasters annually are from the Asia Pacific Region. In most cases, the people in this segment of society lack options in terms of resilience or climate crisis mitigation aside from what’s available to them personally and locally.

We are building our solution to be inclusive of as many people and communities as possible because there is no single solution to the climate crisis and the challenges of environmental sustainability. Local solutions require local insight and involvement, and this is why the Bike Scouts platform is possibly the only social platform that is actively building communities online and offline through local leaders and teams that take the lead in initiatives that are launched by the community through the platform.

We like to say that we are local wherever we work or have a presence because Bike Scouts has been 100% local community-driven from the start empowered by global support from the ecosystem of communities that we are continuing to build in the Philippines and in other countries. The more people and communities there are on the platform the more resources, knowledge, and skills that each platform member, local team, or community have access to turn solutions into reality.

The challenges of ecosystem management and sustainability are a people problem. Where there are people there will be impact on nature and climate, and in most cases the simplest and most effective solution to these problems is social participation in specific behavioral changes, ideas, or action that removes the cause or mitigates the problem. For us, it makes sense to address the root of the challenge in order to tackle its impact. We generate long-term adoption at scale by building a social platform where all other solutions can stem from.

Bike Scouts is at growth stage because it has been operational across the Philippines for the past 8 years in partnership with the organizations such as the Dutch Embassy, Danish Embassy, UNOCHA-CoPCE, GNDR, Decathlon and others in activating people and communities for climate change mitigation initiatives, bicycle mobility adoption, food security, resilience, and community-based disaster response. We are at the point that we have to automate our engagement with our community and partners and need to build a platform that provides us with the specific tools that will allow us to do our work better. 

The innovation of the Bike Scouts platform is the way that it uses the scale of communities to match the scale of the challenges that people have to face in order to deal with climate change, resilience, and sustainability. It’s about the network of support that people are willing to be a part of, claim as their own, and use as their currency for social relevance instead of virality and outrageous or entertaining things. It doesn’t seem possible but in the past eight years it’s exactly what’s been happening in the Bike Scouts community. We fill the last missing thing of people’s lives on social media - the part where they get to be the heroes that nobody expects. We fill the missing part where a lot of people post about help that’s needed and the same people who share it actually do something about it. We fill the part where even when electricity or access to the internet gets cut off the community aspect of the platform still goes on.

Currently serving (estimated): 350,000 nationwide in the Philippines

In one year (estimated): 500,000 Philippines and Nepal

In five years, we hope to serve 2 million people globally.

The way that we measure impact generated by the platform is through local indicators such as the volume of participation against the volume of initiatives or scope of work in solving local problems. On a larger scale, we eventually plan to measure the number of team or community activations (the number of local Bike Scouts teams or communities that go online) across the Bike Scouts platform against the rate of activity in terms of engagement, participation, and support that's generated for sustainability, resilience, environmental protection, social good, and community-based disaster response. 

3 full time

2 part time

4 part time volunteer staff

2 advisors

The Bike Scouts team have a professional background in the advertising and marketing industry that serves our business model well and have already helped secure clients and generate revenue. We also have members of the team that have long experience in media, media production, governance and policy, advocacy management, community management, and tech entrepreneurship. Our business development is handled by a long time account management head of a global advertising agency. 

50% of the Bike Scouts management team are women and one of our primary intiatives to develop an inclusive team and community leadership for the Bike Scouts community is our Barbie Riders team that represent the LGBTQ+ community, we have also been encouraging the participation of indigenous representatives to take leadership roles in programs that are relevant to them and have included the unique need for support of indigenous peoples in the Philippines through projects like our recent ride to promote the inclusion of tribes in the Sierra Madre range of the Philippines in plans for vaccination against the Covid-19 virus.

Bike Scouts is a startup that has done very well through partnerships and programs that provide access to knowledge and potential sources of support in terms of technical and financial resources - we hope to gain the same things from Solve in addition to the prestige of being a part of the program and, in addition, the $10,000 given to each selected team may be small for US-based startups and projects but in the Philippines it's already half of what we need to build a proper platform to serve an existing community, need, and business.

Bike Scouts is in a stage of growth where expansion in countries around Asia and possibly in North America is going to be a game-changer in terms of membership and client acquisition.

We would like to partner with MIT. There is a very big need for human-focused technology that serves human challenges in the world. We know how to monetize the technology and the service but there is no real support for anything that isn't 100% profit-driven. We believe in profit and sustainability, of course, but we would like to be the exception that develops a model where sustainability is a consequence of including everyone in the potential benefits of new ideas - by design.

Connecting communities and transforming them into a network of support for social benefit is at the heart of what the Bike Scouts does as a community and as a company. We also already have an operational network of communities that has been existing for the past 8 years that we can certainly develop into something bigger and better and then expand its reach into other countries where we can truly make a difference.

The Philippines is a country where a large portion of the population have access to the web but have no access to even the most basic financial services aside from mobile payment systems that charge a large fee for every transaction. This is a problem for many in our community in terms of participation in anything that requires transactions, from community-driven projects to disaster reposne and resilience. In addition, our long term plan is to migrate all of the Bike Scouts data and digital assets to Blockchain to ensure that we are future-proof and will be able to continue to serve our community for the long term.