The Story of Kids Bike Taupo
I’ll admit, before writing this, I’d never actually been in front of Taupo BMX Track. I went along one afternoon to take some pictures and ended up staying far longer than planned, watching tiny kids roll down a ramp on their bikes like it was nothing. One of the mums nearby explained how it works: the kids start on the smallest drop, just a gentle little dip, and once they’re completely comfortable with that, only then do they move up to something higher. Nobody pushes them into it; they decide for themselves when they’re ready to go further.
It’s a small thing, but it says a lot about what Kids Bike Taupo is. Run by a local woman named Cath, out of Bike Taupo, with her partner Phil handling all the bike maintenance behind the scenes, it’s a completely free programme that takes bikes out to early childhood centres, schools and bike parks across the Taupo district, teaching kids to ride with confidence from the time they can walk right through to their teens. If that afternoon, in front of Taupo BMX Track is anything to go by, it’s worth knowing a bit more about the woman behind it, and maybe getting involved yourself.
How Did Kids Bike Taupo Actually Come About?
It started, in Cath’s own words, with a stack of bikes and a hunch. She was working for the after school programme for Taupo District Council; they wanted kids to be more active, so they applied for funding and bought some bikes, only to find many of the children couldn’t pedal on their own. Looking back, she’s not surprised; old photos from her own kids’ childhood on the Kapiti Coast always show extra children at the house and Phil fixing up bikes in the background. I asked how she got started, and her honest answer was that she’d always just done it.
The next piece clicked at a Cycling Summit in 2012, where a Bikes in Schools speaker pointed out that Taupo did cycling events brilliantly, so why weren’t local people actually riding? At the time Cath was working four days on, four days off, at the AC Baths, and spent her days off hauling bikes out to schools at lunchtime. She trained as a cycle instructor and started helping teach road safety, which is where the real lightbulb moment landed, there’s no point teaching a child to ride safely if they can’t ride at all. So she shifted her focus further back, to early childhood centres, with one goal: get every child riding by five.
Was There A Moment You Remember Thinking, “Right, I’m Doing This”?
By then Cath was also the secretary and administrator at Bike Taupo, and the committee decided her programme was worth backing properly. She could fundraise and invoice for her time, so long as there was money in the “bucket” to draw from. She once wrote an invoice that used up the very last of it, and the next day Rotary handed over a cheque for seven thousand dollars from Cycle Challenge. “I felt like the universe was on my side,” she says. Giving up the permanent job was the real turning point, made easier by her own kids having left home by then.
Who Was In Your Corner When You Started?
Nobody does this alone, and Cath is quick to say so. Growing inside Bike Taupo gave her a huge head start; it’s a cycling advocacy group that also builds and maintains the region’s mountain biking trails, plants trees, and even runs its own pest control arm, and being part of an already established charity like that meant she wasn’t starting from nothing. Kids Bike Taupo now runs as its own branch. Sport Waikato gave early seed funding, Rotary paid for the first van, a charity golf tournament later helped fund the current one, and Contact Energy has since fitted it with a new motor and signage. Schools and early childhood contacts opened doors, the BMX Club regularly opens up its gates for her, and Taupo District Council chips in with storage and support, even though this has never actually been a council programme; people just assume it is because they know her from the Baths. And quietly behind everything is Phil, on a small retainer as the mechanic. Without him, she says plainly, there’d be no bikes to hand out.
Was There A Point Where You Weren’t Sure This Would Work, Or Any Harder Patches Since?
Honestly, no, there was never a moment of doubt. The closest thing to a hard patch was a stretch a few years back, running extra weekend events on top of everything else, when a committee member heard how exhausted she was and simply asked why she was booking so much. It stuck. These days she makes sure she doesn’t overbook her schedule.
What Does A Typical Week Actually Look Like?
Busy, is the short answer. Cath visits around forty four early childhood centres and schools a year, as far out as Mokai, Kuratau, Rangitaiki and Turangi, working most often with what she calls “the willing,” the places that get the most out of it. On Mondays she unlocks the usually locked BMX track so neighbourhood kids can get in, bike or not. On Tuesdays she takes children to Craters Mountain Bike Park under her own umbrella, so families ride without needing a membership. Across it all, roughly two hundred kids a year learn to ride for the first time, out of somewhere between eight and ten thousand rider visits annually. Her van is basically a mobile shed; she jokes that nobody else can fit as many bikes into one vehicle as she can.
What Have You Learned About What Works, And What Doesn’t?
Simply giving bikes to ECE centres, schools and families doesn’t work, she learned that early; turning up instead, with bikes maintained and ready to go, then taken away again, holds up far better. She’s also learned that some children prefer everyone having the same kind of bike, so nobody feels better or worse off, a lesson she never expected.
One of her favourite outcomes is the ripple effect it’s had. A group of mums and grandmothers first started coming along so their kids could build confidence on a bike. Before long they were riding themselves too, and one long weekend the whole group rode the Timber Trail together. As Cath puts it, half laughing, get the mothers riding and the rest of the family follows.
If Someone Was Standing Where You Were A Few Years Ago, What Would You Tell Them?
Community, every time. Being visible somewhere like a reception desk, where local families already know your face, is worth more than any business plan, and it helps that this was never about making money, with Bike Taupo already standing behind her.
What’s One Thing This Has Taught You That You Didn’t Expect To Learn?
Ask her that, and she comes back to a whakataukī she clearly loves: he tangata, he tangata, he tangata. It is the people, it is the people, it is the people. The best things really aren’t about money, and she’s always been looked after, because people see the benefit in what she does.
If You Had Unlimited Money And Resources, What Would You Do?
Take it nationwide, no hesitation. A short film about her work once reached a Rotary club as far away as Launceston, Tasmania, and people from other New Zealand towns regularly ask who does this job where they live, only to find nobody does. Closer to home, she’d love a “wing person” alongside her in the van, and one proper building instead of a bike shed, an office and storage spread across town. She’s sixty three, still loving every bit of it, and reckons that when the time comes to pass the baton on, the hardest person to replace would probably be Phil.
It started with a few bikes that nobody could ride, and it grew into a whole community quietly making sure that would never happen again. If you’ve got kids who could use a bit more confidence on two wheels, or an old bike sitting in the shed, Cath and Phil would love to hear from you.
Ways to support Kids Bike Taupo
If this has got you thinking you’d like to help out, here’s how.
- Buy a Bike Taupo membership; riders’ fees at Craters Mountain Bike Park help fund the programme.
- Make a donation through the Kids Bike Taupo website.
- Drop off a good quality secondhand bike or helmet at the community bike shed to be refurbished and passed on.
- Get in touch about volunteering, including mechanic help.
- Or just turn up. Sessions run Monday afternoons at the BMX track, Tuesdays at Craters, and Thursdays at Crown Road, generally from around 3:30 to 5pm, and everyone’s welcome to come along and give it a go.
