Integrating, One Pedal at a Time

On a July afternoon in Saint-Laurent, a dozen women newly arrived in Quebec are learning to ride a bike in an elementary school parking lot. Many are immigrants who grew up in Africa, and for most of them, it's a first: lacking the opportunity, they were never able to learn in their home country. They're taking part in Vélo Québec's Toutes à vélo program, a series of seven sessions where learning happens among women, guided by female instructors.

Behind learning to ride a bike lies an often-overlooked integration challenge: mobility. For these women, knowing how to pedal becomes an affordable and independent way to get to francization classes, work, or school. One participant, a legal techniques student who arrived alone in the dead of winter, describes the long waits for buses in the cold: for her, the bike represents a newfound freedom in a city she's still getting to know.

The sessions are also a space for solidarity. Between balance exercises, the women share tips, but also the challenges of rebuilding a life here: searching for a job that matches their qualifications, waiting for a work permit, savings running out. The profiles vary, from a 19-year-old woman to a 72-year-old participant who came to join her daughter, learning French, English, and biking all at once.

CARI Saint-Laurent is a partner in the program. Leah Blythe, social integration counselor at CARI, observes that many of these women believe they're the only ones who don't know how to ride and feel embarrassed about it. It's by coming together as a group that they discover they're not alone and motivate each other. The moment when they finally manage to ride, she says, is a real breakthrough.

The need far exceeds the supply: the program, which trained a hundred women when it was created in 2021, was supporting over five hundred two years later, and the waiting list continues to grow. For CARI, this partnership illustrates a simple belief: integration also happens through concrete actions that break down barriers, one pedal stroke at a time.

Original article: La Presse, "S'intégrer, un coup de pédale à la fois" (August 10, 2024). https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/2024-08-10/s-integrer-un-coup-de-pedale-a-la-fois.php