The word “confidence” gets thrown around in the bike industry. Bikes are "confidence inspiring" and features like disc brakes and stable geometries raise your confidence at every turn. But the biggest boost to confidence is born from experience. As grown-ups, the more we accumulate, the more we think, “If only I’d had this confidence when I was a kid?”
Globally, numerous organizations and programs aim to do just that —give girls the confidence they need to take on the world. Take Lael Wilcox’s
GRIT program (an after-school program in Alaska that empowers middle school girls through bikes), and the ever-growing chapters of
Little Bellas in the USA, for example. The success of these programs speaks volumes to the value of role models on our girls’ lives, but how do they do it? Is there something we can take from their experience and fold into our own?
Sarah Schreib, Program Director in Vermont, has been a mentor with Little Bellas since the very beginning — over 10 years. She’s seen it grow from one chapter in Vermont to 15 chapters nationwide. Founders and sisters, Lea and Sabra Davison, originally saw it as a way of encouraging more girls to race, but it didn’t take long for Little Bellas to evolve into something else.
“I think, really quickly, they realized that just getting the girls on the bikes was the most important thing,” says Schreib. “The racing thing became very secondary, if at all. It was more about just getting them confident, getting them out, getting them riding.”