Merici Sports is a not-for-profit Community Interest Company based in Devon, set up Chris Jones, who suffered life-changing injuries whilst serving in the British Army. Among other things Chris is a keen mountain biker, and after years watching his wife and son head off across the moor on their bikes, he decided to find a way to go mountain biking again and join them.

Extensive internet searches found that almost all the hand-powered bikes available were expensive and unsuitable. Those designed specifically for off-road use and the kind of terrain Chris wanted to ride were prohibitively expensive. Having bought himself a hand-cranked off-road bike he discovered just how poor their performance really is. High quality, affordable mountain bikes are just not available to disabled people the way they are for everyone else.

This spurred Chris on to spend the last 10 months working with a professional design engineer to develop a ‘proper’ mountain bike, adapted to suit a range of disabilities, but still sell for less than half the price of current models. Chris believes this is the first time an adaptive mountain bike has been designed in this way – first and foremost as an off-road bike.

Merici Sports is now seeking to raise £40,000 to bring that design to life and allow them to test it fully before bringing it into production for the millions of disabled people in the UK and around the world, who simply want to ride a bike through the countryside with their friends and family. This investment will allow them to achieve the following:

• Completion of the design to a manufacturing spec, allowing the design to be put straight into production once testing is complete.
• Construction and testing of prototype bikes, tested not just for the range of conditions they can handle, but for the range of disabilities they can accommodate.
• Addition and testing of existing adaptive components to fit an even wider range of disabled riders.
• By completing all of the above we will be ready to put the bikes into production, hopefully by the end of 2013/early 2014.

You can make a contribution from £5 to £10,000 which come with a range of exclusive rewards. See the fundraising page for more details.

The Impact

• Disabled people are often excluded from normal daily activities, or at best will receive a marginalised, watered-down version of the experience that able-bodied people get.

• Adaptive equipment often costs a vast amount more than the able-bodied equivalents, creating further barriers to disabled participation.

• Most families with a disabled member will forego normal family activities so as not to isolate the person with the disability, meaning the whole family miss out on opportunities that normal families take for-granted.

• By helping move this project forward you will finally show disabled people world-wide that they need not accept the status quo.

• Your support will show the world that people with disabilities will take up active sports if the right equipment is made available at the right price.

• You can be part of a project that will give people with disabilities affordable, independent access to places they have simply not been able to get to until now.

Other Ways You Can Help

If you are unable to support the project financially, you can still help by simply spreading the word, which is most easily done using the share buttons on the fundraising page.