16th Annual Paul Anderson Youth Home Bike Ride kicks off in Toccoa

The 16th Annual Paul Anderson Youth Home Bike Ride is taking place this week in Toccoa-Stephens County.

The 300-mile Journey symbolizes the mental, physical and spiritual advancement made by the more than 1,400 Paul Anderson Youth Home Graduates over the past 60 years.

The Paul Anderson Youth Home is located in Vidalia, Georgia, and is a fully accredited and licensed home offering a second chance to young men in crisis.

The 16th annual Bike Ride kicks off the 60th Anniversary Celebration of the Paul Anderson Youth Home. Over the course of five days, July 19 through the 23rd, five residents of the home will travel a total of more than 300 miles by bicycle on routes through and around Paul Anderson’s hometown of Toccoa, Georgia.
The event is part fundraiser, and each rider can be sponsored by donors at payhbikeride.com.

They will be riding in the rural northeast of the state, passing into South Carolina, and traveling around Tallulah Gorge State Park, the Chattahoochie-Oconee National Forest, and small Georgia towns Wiley, Lula and Lakemont.
The event also recalls and commemorates a foundational moment in the history of Paul Anderson Youth Home.

At its founding in 1961, the former Olympic gold-medal winner Anderson hopped on a bicycle and rode from Vidalia, Georgia, 1,200 miles to Omaha, Nebraska. He did this for the same reasons the five boys do it today, to raise funds and raise awareness of the mission to give troubled young men a second chance through Christ.

Now 60 years later, the Paul Anderson Youth Home celebrates more than 1,400 lives changed through a process of recovery, restoration, and redemption.
Since the riders are students of the Paul Anderson Youth Home, each young man’s struggle to overcome emotional problems, bad decisions, and spiritual challenges is symbolized in the physical fortitude to travel such distances.

Anderson, a world-class athlete, stressed physical fitness as one component of honoring God. The endurance needed to achieve these distances, in turn, honors his lessons of how exercising the body is as important as exercising the mind, filling it with positivity and prayer.
Sponsorships are still available for the 16th annual Bike Ride. To learn more about Paul Anderson Youth Home and family resources, visit payh.org.