What are Bike Scouts and Superscout?
Superscout is a platform for the Bike Scouts community that comes together in times of need to use "social teamwork" to solve local challenges in communities related to climate-driven disasters, resilience, and other problems that people experience in their daily lives.
In times of disasters the Superscout platform does four things:
1. Serves as a platform for social teamwork where the Bike Scouts community members serves as a scalable network of support for people-led and community-driven disaster preparedness, resilience, and response. What the community does isn't charity and it's certainly not an advocacy. Social teamwork is based on the Filipino culture of Bayanihan or people helping each other solve local problems with whatever we have without the expectation of return. We do things this way because this is how people actually are in real world communities that understand the value of having a sense of responsibility for each other on regular days and in times of great need.
2. Serves as a platform for true local disaster information and data where people in their own communities help report and monitor disaster events as they happen and serve as a reliable and verifiable source of information for response and assistance.
3. Serves as a platform for true local resilience and response because the Bike Scouts community serve where we live. We don't swoop down like superheroes from somewhere faraway, we are already where we are needed long before there's a need. None of us joined the community and the platform because of some noble purpose to "make a difference" in the world. We help others in the places we call home because that's where we live with our own families, neighbors, and friends and we would like to be able to stand on our own feet and become safe and able to survive with genuine diginity.
4. Serves as a direct connection between people who can help and those that need help. Superscout removes the third party in the work to create true local resilience and response. You no longer need to depend on reports and presentations that are often designed to make everything sound like an accomplishment. The Superscout platform shows everyone the things that have actually been done, the things that didn't work out, and the things that still need to be worked on through the words of the people themselves who live in the places affected by disaster events and crises.
Bike Scouts and the Superscout platform are equally unique projects that have never been attempted before because of the general belief that the traditional approach of putting profit before anything else is the only way to build things that last, which is simply not true.
It might be more difficult to get things off the ground by not focusing on profit but in the long run things that are built on genuine value for people and planet rather than short-term business goals will outlast everything for a very simple reason - people support things that provide genuine value for ourselves, our family, and community even when we can’t afford to be a customer.
This is what real value generation is all about, and the people who benefit from things that genuinely solve real problems we experience in daily life without the requirement for a transaction are what becomes a part of who we are instead of just being something that we buy when we have money.
Speaking of real problems, the most unrecognized challenge we all face that most of us don’t realize until we experience it first-hand is the lack of real connection between each other and between groups and communities that we’re a part of in times of climate-driven disasters, economic crises, and other events that isolate us from our family, friends, our way of making a living, and the opportunity to thrive.
Everyone talks about impact, but you will never find any measure or record of it that comes from actual people without being scripted, coerced, or stage-managed. That's the reason why everyone thinks that things are getting done even though nobody is actually working to fix the most basic problems that make everything else impossible to accomplish.
In reality, fixing problems is not that easy and it requires the patience to address underlying causes before getting to the grand outcomes.
As a donor, philanthropist, or someone who just wants to help, imagine if you could directly ask people that you want to help if what they got actually solved anything or did your money just become the budget for a very well-choregraphed feel-good publicity stunt?
We think that in an age when everyone can reach out to everyone else nobody should be getting important stories of the "impact" they want to make from second-hand sources.
Authenticity comes from hearing the story straight from the source.
What we can change together:
Click here if you're interested in being a Founding Backer for our goal of building a platform for Bayanihan! Available Soon!
What is the Bike Scouts community?
This is why Bike Scouts exist as a community that serves as a network of support for anyone and everyone because we can’t depend on being organized enough in the real world when the most chaotic things happen that disrupt our lives. Bike Scouts is a network of support that allows even just one person to scale the ability to do something helpful when it’s needed, where it’s needed.
Bike Scouts was launched in 2013 as a way for Filipinos to provide an alternative means of access to communications, information, and essential supplies using bicycles in the immediate aftermath of category-5 Typhoon Yolanda that caused over 6,000 deaths and severe damage to multiple villages, towns, and cities. Today, Bike Scouts is still the only continuously-operating volunteer bicycle messenger service for disaster response in the world with on-ground experience in all kinds of severe disaster events including storms, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and the global Covid-19 pandemic. When disasters happen in the Philippines Bike Scouts is the only operational delivery system for people that’s free of charge for anyone to almost anywhere wherever help is needed.
What is the Superscout Platform?
Superscout is a platform that’s designed to be a place where anyone and everyone can find others to participate in social teamwork which is basically about people coming together to contribute their time, skill, tools, resources, and even money to do something important for others. Social teamwork is based on the Filipino culture of Bayanihan that’s all about helping others in our own community solve local problems with whatever we have and without the expectation of return. Bayanihan is something we do out of habit not out of charity but because it’s what people in a community do for each other.
The Superscout platform was built by volunteers and maintained through Bayanihan with the help of professional IT and technology partners. Superscout was built and continues to be developed and operate without funding allowing the Bike Scouts community to design and build our own platform without the demands for profit before people and planet that other investor-platforms have to contend with.
What is “Bayanihan?”
Bayanihan is a combination of two Filipino words “Bayan” which means country or community and “Bayani” which means hero. Combined, these two words can literally be translated to “being a hero for your own community.”
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