marcus evans recently provided 30 bicycles to children in a vulnerable community in Vietnam, through the Christina Noble Children’s Foundation (CNCF) bicycle support programme. The bicycles were given to children from an orphanage in Ca Mau province.

 

“A bicycle is not just a bicycle for a child from a disadvantaged background living in a poverty-stricken rural community. It goes much further than that. It truly transforms their life, and increases school attendance by stopping children from dropping out of school entirely. Bicycles allow these children to safely commute to and from school, which is more than often a long and unsafe journey for these communities,” said Olivia Hearn, Executive Director of Partnerships at CNCF.

 

Since it started supporting CNCF initiatives a few years ago, marcus evans has funded 60 bicycle kits, which includes a high-quality bicycle, safety helmet and in-person CNCF road safety training.

 

“That is a total of 60 children not dropping out of school, helping their families reduce transportation expenses and ultimately helping both the child and their wider family to break their generational cycle of poverty. Most of the children supported by marcus evans with these bicycles do not have parents. In most rural communities, the school dropout rate for children without a bicycle is very high. Education is the tool that will allow and empower them to break that poverty cycle.”

 

A British charity established in 1989 by Christina Noble OBE, CNCF currently has over 20 grassroots projects and programmes across education, health and community development in Vietnam and Mongolia.

 

“Christina established CNCF in Ho Chi Minh City after visiting Vietnam in 1989 and seeing first-hand the challenges faced by local children living on the streets in extreme poverty in the aftermath of the American-Vietnam war. Christina was strongly driven by her own childhood living in poverty, having survived years of hardship in orphanages and homelessness on the streets of Dublin. She knew first-hand what it was like to be marginalised, isolated, and denied a childhood and basic human rights. Thirty-three years later and CNCF has now impacted well over 1 million children’s lives with sustainable support to protect, empower and enable entire communities to lift themselves out of poverty. In 1997, Christina travelled to Mongolia and saw the deprivation and poverty left behind after the withdrawal of the Soviet Union and the socio-economic collapse of the country as a result - orphaned and abandoned children were roaming the streets and living in the manholes to stay warm from bitterly cold temperatures reaching as low as -50 (Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia is the coldest capital city in the world). Christina felt compelled to do something and immediately expanded CNCF’s operations into Mongolia,” Hearn explained.   

 

With a similar passion for education and professional development, Marcus Evans, the Chairman of the marcus evans Group, was touched by the potential social impact of supporting vulnerable children by providing new bicycles.

 

“Our central aim as a business is to help our clients and their businesses navigate change to be the best version of themselves, with our products and services focused on removing barriers to this. Our goals therefore perfectly align with what CNCF initiatives are achieving, where their central focus is on empowering people to transform their own lives and removing barriers to help them achieve this. With access to education a primary driver to turning your life around, regardless of your circumstances, this initiative really struck a chord with me. Without a bicycle, many children cannot even get to school. By removing this simple access barrier, it provides the catalyst for disadvantaged communities to break the cycle of poverty and improve their own circumstances, changing their future for the better. We will look to continue to support such initiatives and I am keen to hear from our teams of any similar opportunities where we can be the catalyst for change in the lives of disadvantaged people,” Marcus Evans said.