GPC Donations
Every year, the Grizzly Peak Cyclists makes donations out of proceeds raised by our Century to non-profit organizations which promote or help bicycling in some way — be it advocacy, safety, education, awareness, youth biking, or the bicycling environment. This is consistent with our objectives as stated in Article III of our Bylaws “to provide cyclists with a variety of challenging bicycle-riding experiences and to promote safe bicycle riding and touring.” For each recipient organization, a GPC member is designated as GPC Liaison. Here is a list of our current GPC Liaisons. Feel free to contact our Donations Chair at DonationsChair at grizz dot org if you have any questions.
Procedure
The process usually occurs in the late summer and fall. It consists of these steps:
- The Board of Directors decides the amount of funds needed to be held in reserve and the amount available for donation.
- A proposal for the year's donation allocations, in the amount set by the Board in step 1, is prepared by the Donation Committee. That committee consists simply of all GPC members who attend the donation meeting. The donation meeting is announced in advance in the club newsletter, the Wheel Truth. Attendance is limited to GPC members.
- Detailed presentations on behalf of current or potential donation recipients are not made at the Donation Committee meeting. Instead, any such presentations should be made as a program presentation at a regular monthly club meeting.
- The proposed donation allocation is published in the Wheel Truth as required by the bylaws Article V Section 4(b)(vii).
- At a regular club meeting after the publication of the Wheel Truth, the donation proposal from the committee is voted up or down as a package. No fine tuning is done, unless members at the club meeting explicitly agree to do so by majority vote. If the proposal is rejected, then it's back to step 2: a new Donation Committee meeting is held to prepare a new proposal.
Guidelines
All donations must meet these guidelines:
- Must be directly related to cycling.
- Must be active in Alameda and/or Contra Costa Counties, or be a regional, statewide, or national organization whose activities affect Alameda and/or Contra Costa counties.
- Must work to provide broad and inclusive community access to the economic, environmental, and health benefits of cycling.
- Donations must be granted to organizations, not to individuals.
- No donations to, or on behalf of, individuals doing rides, regardless of the cause being ridden for.
- All non-governmental recipients must be charitable organizations ((501(c)3s in the tax code.)
Voting
GPC does not normally allow absentee or proxy voting. For the votes taken at the general meetings as part of steps 4 and 5 above, proxy voting is expressly prohibited by the bylaws, Article V Section 7.
However, due to the difficulty of scheduling the annual Donation Committee meeting (step 2 above) on a day which permits all to attend, the Committee allows absentee voting by standing Donation Liaisons (only) at the meeting, provided that they make their date restrictions known in advance of scheduling the meeting.
Timeline for 2024 Donations
Requests from potential new recipients are best made in Winter or Spring so there is adequate time to schedule a meeting presentation (see above) or prepare an article for the Wheel Truth; however, there is no harm in trying during Summer. Such presentations are not required, but can be quite helpful. The deadline for donation requests will be October 15, 2024. The request should be submitted electronically to DonationsChair at grizz dot org. The request should be at most three paragraphs:
- The mission of the organization (or the portion of the organization requesting funding)
- What the organization has done with past GPC funding if applicable
- What the organization proposes to do with any GPC funding from this round of donations
View the requests for 2024, all in one document.
Year 2023 Donations
The board determined that $20,000 could be donated. The Donations Committee met virtually on September 6, 2023 and developed a Donation Proposal, listed below which was published in the October Wheel Truth. The proposal was adopted at the October Business Meeting. Checks were sent out by the end of October.
| Albany Strollers & Rollers | $1,000 |
| Bay Area Outreach & Rec Program | 1,900 |
| Bike East Bay | 2,050 |
| California Ass'n of Bicycling Org's | 350 |
| California Bicycle Coalition | 550 |
| California Field School | 1,600 |
| Cycles of Change | 2,400 |
| El Cerrito Strollers & Rollers | 1,100 |
| League of American Bicyclists | 350 |
| Legal Services for Prisoners w/ Children Community Giveback Program |
1,600 |
| Mt. Diablo Bike Turnout Project | 1,600 |
| Rich City Rides | 2,100 |
| Street Level Cycles | 2,300 |
| Walk Oakland Bike Oakland | 1,100 |
| TOTAL | $20,000 |
Contact People and Further Information
Requests from potential new recipients and questions about the donation process or the Donation Committee should be sent to the Donation Committee Chair, DonationsChair at grizz dot org . Program presentations at regular club meetings are scheduled through the club President President at grizz dot org. For more detailed contact information, see our Contact page.
We maintain a discussion forum for the Donation Committee. It is used, for example, to help schedule the annual meeting and distribute materials. Subscription is open to GPC members only.
Committee Documents
Additional documents and information specific to the Committee and its work are available to GPC members (login required). Documents for the current and all past donation years are available here.
Documents prior to 2018 can still be accessed via our older committee page, but this method requires authentication using the generic club user/password that you receive by email each month with the Wheel Truth announcement. Please note that this is a generic club user/password, not a personal one, and too many authentication failures will lock you out of the web site for several hours. If you are a member and don't have your monthly email, you can request it be resent.
Remarks
Here are some observations from the past Donation Committee Chair based on watching our Donation Committee make its decisions over the past few years.
- Causes are more likely to be funded if the request originates from GPC members than from outside.
- Causes are more likely to be funded if they benefit a large number of bicyclists, or the bicycling public as a whole.
- Causes which are very local (for example, focused within a particular municipality or on a particular amenity) are much more likely to be funded if they are within our main membership home area or one of our main riding areas.
Over the years, the club adopted (perhaps informally) a number of policies regarding donations. But apparently they were never written up . . . at least, not where they could be easily found. Mark Abrahams took on this task in 2003. A verbal outline of these procedure and guidelines was presented at the club meeting of 16 July 2003, and consensus was to proceed with a written version. A written draft was circulated for comment at the meeting of 20 August 2003, and a revised draft was published in the Wheel Truth, September 2003, page 1. The procedure and guidelines were formally approved at the club meeting of 17 September 2003.
In 2009, revisions were made as follows. Step 3 (it was step 2 at the time) of the procedure now shown above was discussed at the club meeting of 11 March 2009 and was formally approved at the club meeting of 8 April 2009 along with some corresponding changes elsewhere in the text. Former guideline (e) was superseded by the new step 3 and was removed at the same time.
In 2011, the Donation Committee decided to allow the limited form, described above, of absentee voting by standing Donation Liaisons at the Committee's annual meeting. That decision applied to 2011 and into the future.
In 2015, revisions were made as follows. At its meeting of 11 February 2015, the club decided that the Board of Directors would determine the maximum that can be donated. The steps above were updated accordingly (though not until May 2015): step 1 of the procedure was added and step 2 was revised. The previous steps 1, 2, etc, were renumbered as steps 2, 3, etc.
At the club meeting on 12 October 2022, the donation Guidelines above were revised to focus more closely on cycling-specific organizations and Alameda and/or Contra Costa counties. This was prompted by a reduction in century profits, which was expected to continue in the future, due to shifting century priorities.
In an email discussion in mid October 2022 the Board of Directors streamlined the process by dropping the previous requirement for two votes on the proposed donations at two separate club meetings.