Bahati Foundation: Helping kids to a better life
From VeloNews.com
The Bahati Foundation is impacting lives for the better through cycling.
People often ask: What does the Bahati Foundation actually do? What are its successes or failures? The answers to those questions originate in the foundation’s formal vision statement: “Our vision is to expose under-represented youth to cycling and assist them in maintaining active participation as the next generation of cyclists by nurturing and encouraging alternative mobility.”
To get more detailed answers, we asked the foundation’s executive director Rashid Bahati and his son, the foundation chairman Rahsaan Bahati, for some examples of kids who have come through their programs and found success in life.
Rahsaan immediately came up with “a kid the same age as me, Kenny Burgess, that I met at the high school I went to in Los Angeles. I met him in class after he saw a small little article on me in the LA Times sports section after I went to the Pan-American Games with the U.S. team. After reading the article about me he went absolutely crazy, saying, ‘I want to do what you do.’ He ended up racing and I helped him join a program that got him into college, at Indiana University; he went on to do great things. He lives in Georgia now, has a family, has a great career, and of the three or four people in our circle he was the one with the least support coming from home. So, when people blow back on Kenny, they say how proud they are of him. He overcame a lot.”
Rashid recalled other young people that were helped by the foundation and went on to major achievements. “We had a young man in 2016 or ’17, Keyshawn Blackstone, who was greatly overweight before coming to us. He lost a bunch of weight, was cycling everywhere, doing a lot of good stuff, and we were able to get him a major scholarship through one of our supporters, to help in school. He was a high achiever and cycling did a lot for his life. It really turned him around.”
