Unity 2018

The 2018 Unity jersey is no longer available – this page remains to summarize the goals of this special release.

When we launched the Unity Jersey in 2017, our goal was to drive our own cycling culture to be more inclusive, more welcoming and more global. Cycling can be a closed network, a collection of secret handshakes. Feeling the unity in pedaling together, we launched the Unity Jersey with an eye towards causes we believed in. 100% of the proceeds on the 2017 Unity Jersey went to the ACLU, the Human Rights Campaign, Amnesty International, and World Bicycle Relief.

The type of connection that is made through a shared ride has long term effects off of the saddle. Our staff is small but it contains both parents of young children and immigrants. The family separations at the border this year feel painful and close. Mostly, it feels avoidable, with the right path forward.

For us, cycling has been a bellwether for what’s possible rather than limitation. Cycling is, almost without exception, where we turn when we need to define a decision, chart a path or find our community. To that end, we’ve reached within that community to cyclist and designer, Lisa Congdon. Her design in this year’s Unity Jersey represents the journey undertaken by those at our southern border, the dangers fraught with that path, the promise of movement and possibility and the darkness that it aims to overcome.

In a sermon in 1958, Martin Luther King Jr wrote:

“When it gets dark enough you can see the stars. Sunlight always hides the depths of the heavens; you cannot see the Milky Way in daytime, but the darkness of the night unveils the North Star by which we chart our course."