Cycling Without Age - Mississauga

 As we were winding up our first session of pilot training orientation and hands on experience, I felt it was getting to the time to move Klare to Port Credit so that the next phase of our training could be done on the actual trails we had planned for our ride season. As I had been a little under the weather last week, I postponed the call for an escort to ride Klare the 6.5km from home to Chartwell Robert Speck until the night before the planned event.  I had decided that a Saturday morning would be best as traffic would be light and co-pilots more available than during the week.  My message out our Streetsville Slow Rollers got several responses and Kim Tan, who is still recovering from his broken collarbone (cycling casualty) offered to attend and record the send off from 1113 Dreamcrest. Although I wasn't feeling the greatest on Saturday morning, the sight of our escort riders buoyed my spirits and we were ready to roll within a few minutes of the designated 10:00am departure

 If you volunteer in a hospital, long term care facility or private retirement residence around seniors then this may be old hat for you.  However, my first exposure was in a conversation with a Life Enrichment Manager at Chartwell Robert Speck. URGENT ADDENDUM ** (as of May 5, ,2023...Scroll to the bottom) While explaining to her our program and the benefits of the excursions on the mental health of their residents, she nonchalantly mentioned that their volunteers needed to get tested for TB.  Having experienced the rigmarole of having got my Level 3 Vulnerable Sector Police clearance certificate after having to submit my fingerprints since my gender and birthdate matched an offender, I was prepared... which is an understatement. As I had not heard of this requirement from any other home I was negotiating with (until more recently when discussing with the Activities Manager at Evergreen Verve), I went online and found the volunteer requirements for Chartwell Volunteers  plainly stated

 Hats off to Joanne Foote for braving through our first actual hands-on training session with Klare!  We were having so much fun that I completely forgot to take any pictures. Being a gorgeous (if slightly cool) afternoon and a wet and windy forecast for the weekend, I was keen on getting some tread time in before the end of the month.  Fortunately Joanne's scheduled opened up and the stars aligned for us to spend an hour (or more?... don't really know where the time went but we had a great time) in the afternoon under sunny skies to go over the basics of the trishaw operations first and then a road trip. I went through a checklist we plagiarized from Wisconsin and touched on all the basics of all the operative features of the trishaw from the mechanical parts to operating the electric assist and battery removal for remote charging.  Since lunch hour had just passed at the High School (Rick Hansen's) opposite my place we opted to take a short cut through their grounds to a

 This Cycling Without Age - Mississauga program would not be feasible if not for the interest, dedication and participation of the staff of the senior care homes and retirement residences.  Under the guidance of the Life Enrichment Manager, a ride co-ordinator will ensure that the rides are promoted to the residents and the ride slots are booked appropriately on the days assigned to that facility. We intend to use Book2Go , a ride booking platform developed by the main Cycling Without Age program in Denmark.  For that purpose, we require all levels of the organization to understand how to use the program.  The four levels of administration are: Manager of the location will oversee operations. Coordinators create and populate rides for pilots who have been cleared by them Captains train and graduate pilots according to their abilities Pilots accept rides after they have been approved by Captains Facility Coordinators will need to make sure that passengers assigned to the rides have thei

 To help spread the word about Cycling Without Age - Mississauga, I have created an app that can be installed (saved on home screen) and shared by anyone with a smart phone.  If opened on a desktop, the app will also give you an option to save a shortcut from your desktop. If you are reading this off your desktop, you can scroll down on the app screen below (which is how you would view it on a smart phone) and scan (or click on) the QR code to save the app to your phone from where you can there share it with relatives, friends, colleagues and care home workers who may be interested in the program. The first link in the app is to our profile on Canada Helps, a convenient portal for making small donations.   It helps provide tax receipts to individuals who wish to help support our program for a percentage fee.  If you wish to make a larger donation (more than $100) we would welcome a direct donation to save on administration fees.  The first three methods on our website DONATE page wi

 On Saturday, April 8 2023, Holy Saturday to some we conducted our second Zoom session as part of our Pilot Training program to go over the ten skills of a qualified CWAM pilot. We were lucky to have veteran pilot and founder of the Brockville CWA, JoAnn Bell, join our small group for which we were thankful despite it being a long weekend in Canada.  We recorded both the main session and the Q&A, both embedded below.  I went over the 10 Skills of a CWAM Pilot document describing the main points of each of the 10 skills.... the most over-riding being SLOWNESS.  Taking it slow is the key to avoiding many of the pitfalls and accidents that we have seen with trishaws, albeit thankfully rare. Although our pilots and co-pilots are experienced bicyclists, they need to learn a new set of three-wheeled riding skills where the passengers, not the rider, are the main focus of the ride so the ideal ride is done slowly with a lot of talking, laughing, stopping to meet other pedestrians both tw