Hi, I'm Julius and kind of lost for words. I'm trying to imagine a way to express my profound sense of gratitude and place at having found the Tas Bike Collective. Why should you support it? Because it transforms lives; mine and so so many more. I started at TasBC in August 2022 with long hair, was grossly unfit and generally anxious. I had trouble finding words and struggled conceptualising things. I had zero emotional resilience and represented a burden to my family and friends. Burnout, redundancy, COVID and then years of working at home left me a husk and desparately needing something to change. Risdon Vale has a particular reputation in Hobart, and so when I first volunteered there I had no idea what to expect. I am ashamed to say that I wondered if my car was going to get stolen, or if I was going to be beaten up for using big words, or mugged. What I found were a bunch of bright eyed, intelligent, engaged individuals working together on something magical. Wether they be staff or kids, volunteers or the general public; that magic touched everyone. What we do is hang out and relate. Sometimes we fix bikes. Or clean up. Or make toasties. But mainly it's about sharing a space together that is safe and calm in which people can share themselves and grow up together. Meanwhile I got a haircut, bike fit and my mental acuity returned. So when thanked for my time at the Bike Collective I feel rather conflicted; if people only knew what this place meant to me they might realise I should be thanking them. But that's the beauty of this place, it's about reciprocal respect, honesty, humility and all the good qualities. The fact that experiences and friendships like these are rare in more affluent areas I find sadly ironic. The boilerplate goes "..The Tasmanian Bike Collective is a charity which provides alternative education and mentoring programs for young people who face additional barriers to education, work and life. We connect with them by rebuilding donated bikes with them. We then re-sell the bikes, but this income only represents a tiny portion of our funding needs..." So yes, in the middle of winter I'm to ride up a big hill with some mud. It's a silly thing to do but the adversity is real and if I am lucky I may even enjoy it. But please don't miss the message here; your sponsorship goes to a profoundly effecting programme that allows real moments of connection to happen, and those moments change lives.