Paying It Forward

The appeal of alleycats is more than just riding fast through traffic—the real clincher that makes people fall in love with the experience and share it with others is the camaraderie. It’s everyone doing it together, in the same city, on the same streets, celebrating the bike and celebrating what can be done with it (and how much abuse in the form of bike wrecks and boozing a body could take).

“We only ever started organizing alleycats as a means of starting a sense of community amongst messengers, not to be ‘bad-asses’ or to be ‘really rad’,” says Chidely.

When Bodyglove asked the New York messengers who had been a part of the “work challenge” how they’d like to get paid, they asked for help in establishing official nonprofit status for the New York Bike Messenger Foundation.

“That helped us rally the community behind the whole thing, going ‘Hey, it’s not a couple messengers getting paid by a corporation, it’s us using this connection to make something happen that will last a long time and benefit people over a number of years,” says Squid.

It’s not unusual for an alleycat to have a community-oriented goal, whether it be raising money for the local messenger association or the Emergency Messenger Fund, to raise awareness for a cause such as the Global Warming Alleycat, or donate to charity as Cranksgiving does. An alleycat in which racers gather food to donate for Thanksgiving, Cranksgiving has been adopted in dozens of cities and continues to be one of the most popular alleycats anywhere (For more on Cranksgiving see Urban Velo issue #35).