Owen's Story

"My name is Owen, I'm 19 years old and I live in Batley.

So I first came to Bumpy when I was eight years old to get into bikes doing lessons.
That was because I absolutely loved motorbike, so my mum thought the best place to do it was to come here and do it properly and safely.

So what I've been doing at BUMPY, I've been coming from eight doing my lessons every now and again as one could afford to do my lessons, trying to get in as much as I can and then coming occasionally.

Growing up I've seen that I could become a volunteer and I wanted to get into doing some volunteer work because at school I wasn't really the best of kids.

I came here, got my head into volunteering and it kept me going and kept me going through school.

So from becoming a volunteer I then started to do a bit of training to get myself up to be able to become an instructor and that's now helped me a lot because I can now communicate with kids and adults a lot easier than I used to because I was quite a shy kid before.

I've also done a bit of mechanics side which has helped me to be able to work on bikes and develop my skills in that side of the department as well, not just an instructor and now I've also been able to become a trusted member of staff at the Bumpy workplace.

So the friends I have now made at Bumpy, I have a lot of kids that now come on their own bikes from me being an instructor to now seeing them riding, they come and interact with me and speak to me as if I'm a young friend, because I'm quite young myself, so that helps with the way I work because they see me as a friend so I can get involved a bit more.

So I enjoy coming to Bumpy on the weekend because for one it gets me out of the house of the weekend and I like that I can help kids ride thathave never ridden a bike before and going from nothing to being able to ride a bike in quite a short time, whereas for me starting it's like I can see my own journey in the kids I teach.

So I would definitely recommend Bumpy as a place to go.It gets your kids off the street and helps them because where I live I see a lot of kids riding around illegally with no helmets on, which is very unsafe. I try to speak to them to get them to come to Bumpy because when you come and ride here it's a very safe place to ride.

I've learned quite a lot of skills from coming to Bumpy. I've learnt that I can be a lot more confident in myself and I can speak to people very easily. It's built my self esteem up a lot. I have worked with groups that have the police alongside me, so that's helped a lot, whereas I'm learning with kids that are not as easy to work with.

So now at this moment in time I'm quite happy with myself, whereas before I was quite a shy and unhappy kid.

It helped me a lot from being a little kid to now realizing that there is a lot of wrongs and right ways to do things.

Me, myself now, I see myself as a lot more mature person and I can actually not look back and think, oh, that's a bit of a bad path I've gone through, it's now made my journey a lot easier in life."