Portland crowd-funds bike park

The city of Portland, Oregon is well known as a bike-friendly place. Yet for mountain bikers, the Pacific Northwest town hasn’t offered much – until now. Thanks to a crowd-funding campaign, the Build Gateway Green project, has raised nearly $124,000 toward the creation of a bike park within the city. The initiative turned to crowd-funding website indiegogo.com to put together the funds to transform an old prison complex into a public park, complete with bike-park facilities.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpU456H0yGU

The 38 acre site sits in east Portland, and is presently unused. The City of Portland has agreed that they will commit the funds needed to maintain the park if others will fund the conversion of the land.

“Gateway Green is about a vision of a community place for people of all ages to come together to enjoy nature, to play, and to meet their neighbours. Gateway Green is about hope, love, and place.” said Rex Burkholder, former Metro Councilor and co-convener of the Gateway Green Oregon Solutions project, on the Indiegogo campaign page.

In the past, mountain bikers living in Portland have had to drive an hour out of town to hit the trails, but the hope is that the Gateway Green project can change all of that.

The Gateway Green project has so far enjoyed support from Columbia Sportswear – backers for the project can get a discount code for Columbia product – as well as the Lumberyard, an indoor mountain bike park in Portland. Coca-Cola has also matched funds up to the limit of $25,000. Kaiser Permanente has also come forward to help with funding. There still remains a great deal of work to do to make the project a reality. The project’s initial goal of $100,000 was meant to cover the design costs for the project. The extra funds will be put towards material and construction costs. However, through their campaign, Build Gateway Green now has a much larger roster of people and organizations ready to help with the project.

The success of the campaign should serve as a call to action for projects across Canada looking for funding.