General Info

The Bicycle Helmet Safety Institute ( BHSI ) is the helmet advocacy program of the Washington Area Bicyclist Association. It grew out of WABA's Helmet Committee, whose members began testing helmets in 1974, and was set up as a separate program, still under WABA, in 1989. BHSI is a small, active non-profit that serves as a consumer advocacy program and a technical resource for bicycle helmet information. Its volunteers serve on the ASTM bicycle helmet standard committee and are active in commenting on standards of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. BHSI provides an email newsletter, and sends out many copies of its Toolkit for Helmet Promotion Programs to anyone who is organizing a helmet effort, and to anyone needing materials for teaching. We are staffed by a few volunteers and funded entirely by consumer donations. We do not accept funding from the helmet industry. On the Internet, BHSI's domain name is helmets.org. We also continue to use our older domain name, bhsi.org. Our Web page makes BHSI materials available to anyone at any time, and we reached almost 600, 000 visitors in 2005. That's nothing for a big site, but huge for us!