152 - Riding a jolly long way for the WordPress community with Dan Maby and Carole Olinger

Interview - Riding a jolly long way for the WordPress community with Dan Maby and Carole Olinger

So this is a little closer to home than any interview I think that I've ever done. That's because I'm both the interviewer and guest at the same time!

You may or may not know that about six months ago I started another podcast called The #PressForward podcast. It's related to WordPress, but not in the way that The WP Builds Podcast is. You see the #PressForward podcast is about the people who make up the WordPress community, and more specifically about the struggles that they have had.

WP and UP is the organisation behind that podcast. They are a non-profit with a mission to support the WordPress community. This could be support with their work, their skills, their mental or physical health. If you need help, you can get in touch with them and get it, free of charge. As soon as I heard about WP and UP, I wanted to be involved and thus the #PressForward podcast was born.

Now, you can imagine that running a global charity is not only hard, it's not cheap either. In fact it's really rather costly, as you can find out here. It cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make this happen, and make it happen in a way that is meaningful and sustainable.

Fast forward to WordCamp Europe in 2019. It was in Berlin and a few of us from WP and UP went along to try to make some noise and get people talking about what we're trying to do. At about that time a chap called Marcel Bootsman decided that he was going to raise some money for charity by walking 500 miles from his home to the location of the WordCamp. This got quite a bit of attention. I even recorded a podcast episode with him.

Well that got us thinking... What if we could do something like that? What if we could get some attention for the charity? So we decided to ride bikes!

Now this is not a small bike ride. This is an alarmingly huge bike ride... 3,000km of bike riding. It's the daddy! You can see the route here. It's somewhat scary. I really mean that, I'm honestly scared about this!

The whole point though is to demonstrate that little changes can make a big difference in your life, and today's guests, Dan Maby and Carole Olinger, like me are not athletes, we're just normal folk. But we've decided to do this and go through all of the myriad things that we need to in order to make it happen. And it's rather a lot.

Aside from (in my case) exercising for the first time in years, there's the route to plan, bikes to buy, sponsors to talk to, fellow riders to bring onboard, cars to hire, hotels to book, media to talk to, money to raise, websites to build... I could go on! It's honestly quite a lot... and that's what this podcast episode is about. It's about why we all decided to do it, how we're getting on doing it and what we hope to achieve.

I really hope that at the end of it you feel motivated to make a donation to the project. We're going to need your help!

Mentioned in this episode:

The route that we're riding...!

HeadTo.org

WPandUP.org

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