Personal resilience & the value of volunteering
The BCI’s Head of Thought Leadership, Rachael Elliott, took a day away from the office to volunteer for a charity very close to her heart, Berkshire Vision.
Rachael is registered as blind following a brainstem stroke five months prior to joining the BCI in September 2018. Just prior to the stroke, Rachael had won the national closed-circuit championships on the bike, and had broken a string of national records.
After the stroke, Rachael had to learn to walk again, and, coupled with losing her sight, cycling was the last of her priorities. However, as she began to get her strength back, she discovered riding – and latterly racing – on the back of a tandem. Although she has since broken most national tandem records, her primary enjoyment of cycling is the freedom to explore the outdoors, the ability to feel the wind in her hair, and smelling/hearing the changing seasons in the Berkshire countryside.
Rachael was previously in another cycling club in Newbury but in 2018, she founded Newbury Velo Cycling Club with Glen Knight. The purpose of the club was to be a club open to everyone and, as Rachael puts it, “the cycling club for people who think they shouldn’t be part of a cycling club”. The club attracted local cyclists from diverse backgrounds, of all different abilities and ages, and boasted more female members on its roster as a percentage than most other clubs in the country. After its first anniversary, the club had over 300 members.
However, one of Rachael’s real passions was helping others to experience cycling who may not be able to otherwise. Effectively, repeating the happy experience that she had enjoyed herself. In order to do this, the club fundraised to buy four tandems and storage for those tandems at a local sports ground. The intention was to help people – whether blind, or with another factor which may prevent them from riding a solo bike – to experience the same joy she had obtained from riding a tandem.
Last week, the realisation of the project came true. Rachael has been a member of the Reading-based sight charity, Berkshire Vision, since she lost her sight. She got in touch to explore opportunities to allow members of the charity to take part in a day where they could experience what it felt like to be on the back of a tandem. With the help of two other members of the club, Melanie Sneddon and Kevin Hurley, a day was arranged for children and teenagers to come from across Berkshire to Newbury and experience riding. For many, this would be the first time ever.
In the meantime, Newbury Velo trained up members to pilot the tandems and, with input from Rachael, learnt some of the intricacies that came with having a blind person on the back (e.g. having your pedals at “3 and 9 o’clock” would mean nothing to someone who has never seen a clock, and allowing the child to feel the whole of the bike before riding it).
The day turned out to be a huge success. Many of the children who were too scared to pedal at first ended up bating their pilots to “go faster” and “race, race, race” by the end of the session. Although this was meant to be a day for the children, for all those involved – including Rachael – it was a truly life affirming day. The children put their complete trust in the pilots to guide them around the fields, which resulted in new, long-lasting bonds. The children were from a range of backgrounds and had varying disabilities, but the trust they had with each other, the sense of shared responsibility, the respect and support of each other, and the grace in which they conducted themselves was something that the whole of society could learn from. The day was a textbook example of personal resilience and was a living example of how “stronger together” makes for a close, effective, understanding, and productive community.
More on
About the author
Rachael Elliott
Head of Thought Leadership, The BCI
I am Head of Thought Leadership and I am happy to talk about BCI Research with any members. I'm happy to present research for Chapter meetings, for Corporate Partners and other relevant events. English is my primary language, but I can also speak French and have a basic understanding of Japanese.
Offical bio: Rachael has twenty years’ experience leading commercial research within organizations such as HSBC, BDO LLP, Marakon Associates, CBRE and BCMS. She has particular expertise in the technology & telecoms, retail, manufacturing and real estate sectors. Her research has been used in Parliament to help develop government industrial strategy and the BDO High Street Sales Tracker, which Rachael was instrumental in developing, is still the UK’s primary barometer for tracking high street sales performance. She maintains a keen interest in competitive intelligence and investigative research techniques.
