Pedals and Pedagogy: Cycles of Hope and Health.

Abstract

The Kalihi Valley Instructional Bike Exchange (KVIBE) is an innovative youth bike program housed in Kokua Kalihi Valley Family Comprehensive Services (KKV), a community health center in Honolulu, Hawai'i. KVIBE utilizes a popular education model to raise the social consciousness of its youth participants, who are primarily working class, Indigenous, and native to the Philippines or the Pacific Islands, especially Micronesia. Initially designed as a bike repair program where youth could earn a bicycle through sweat equity, KVIBE has grown into an educational space that teaches bicycle mechanics as well as personal history and identity. The KVIBE curriculum incorporates a social determinants of health approach with the Four Connections Framework, an Indigenous health framework developed by KKV and the Islander Institute. This article shares details of this program, as a pedagogical model for programs to engage underserved and marginalized Asian, Pacific Islander and Native Hawaiian youth who suffer from displacement and historical trauma via colonization. Additionally, this article speaks to the importance of seeing marginalized youth not as an at-risk group but as agents in creating community health.