Pedal power tackles youth unemployment

From a humble idea to use bicycles as a force for positive change, Good Cycles has evolved into a diverse enterprise that’s created employment pathways for more than 750 young people facing barriers to work, with support from a decade-long philanthropic partnership with Westpac Foundation.  

 

Good Cycles started in 2013 as a simple bike-based social enterprise – a mobile pushbike servicing business on a quest to create jobs for people experiencing long-term unemployment.  

  

Fast forward to today, while bikes remain central to the much-loved Melbourne-headquartered business, Good Cycles’ commercial services have branched out, with around 200 employees delivering offerings across four key divisions, explains Executive Lead People and Impact, Kirra Johnson.

 

“We have our bike retail division, Good Bikes, which now has four shops across Melbourne and Geelong with a huge range of bikes, accessories and bike servicing,” Kirra says. 

  

“In 2018, we started Good Deliveries, a low-emissions logistics service where we use e-cargo bikes to deliver and do things around the city, like organic waste collections, servicing the solar bins, and transporting catering and other products. In 2021, we began Good Spaces, a horticultural and asset management service division, offering gardening, graffiti removal and park maintenance and the like; and the fourth division is Good People, a specialist labour hire business. Essentially, we’ve expanded into areas where there's a market and opportunities to build strong partners to support what we do, which is to maximise the number of good jobs we can make for young people.”

 

The big aim across all these divisions, Kirra explains, is for around 30 percent of the workforce to be part of the social enterprise’s Youth Employment Program at any one time, in line with its vision to create meaningful jobs for young people – aged 18 to 28 years – who face barriers to work.

  

“We take a ‘job first’ approach to the program, where we give the young person a job, on full award wages, so they are part of the team and helping deliver on our commercial contracts,” Kirra says. 

 

“We then provide wraparound support to help them be successful. We have a team of coaches who are qualified youth and social workers who work with that young person as they go on their journey of developing transferable and technical skills, and work on anything else in their lives that has proved to be a barrier to employment in the past.”

  

To date around 750 young people have been part of the program, overcoming a range of barriers such as mental health challenges, low literacy, a history of drug or alcohol use or family violence. Kirra says Good Cycles’ ambition is to double the size of its workforce in the next few years – and this means taking on more young people into the program. 

 

Westpac Foundation was an early supporter of Good Cycles, forging a philanthropic partnership with the social enterprise that has spanned more than 10 years. “The consistent grant funding to support the Youth Employment Program over the lifetime of the social enterprise has been so valuable in enabling the program to grow,” Kirra says. 

  

“The people we work with at Westpac Foundation understand what it is that we're trying to do, they understand the social enterprise ecosystem, and they're passionate about it. That’s played a key part in making it successful.”