Hey Ya’ll,
So maybe you’ve found your way here from an ad on WDET? Or maybe you just come to our website regularly and didn’t know we are a WDET supporter? Well, either way, now you know that The Hub of Detroit is a supporter of our friendly neighborhood non-profit radio station WDET.
If you are new to what we do, if this is your first time here, please let me catch you up:
- Sustainable Practices: Our whole project is based on used bicycles donated to us. We rebuild them and sell some of them (in our retail shop) to fund our project. The rest, we use to teach youth how to build up those bikes. Once they build those bikes, they get them for free. I’ll tell you more about that below.
- Youth Development: So those kids learning how to build bikes – we call that our Youth Earn-a-Bike program which is our main year round program. Last year we got about 150 youth out on bikes through this program. We also give out bikes to youth under the age of 7 since they aren’t quite ready to wrench on bikes.
Every summer we hire a group of high school aged youth to work in our shop and be leaders to the other youth we see. We call this program Mechanic-in-Training. And new this summer, we started doing rides with youth each week. Youth aren’t the future, they are today! - Community Access: This is a pretty vague term. It is the hardest to describe, but this is what bikes are all about to us. Especially in a city like Detroit where neighborhoods are so separated, a tool like a bicycle can connect us. Bicycles can give us access to places we may not have had access to before. This is especially true for youth.
Though sometimes people just want to access a community of cyclists. For adults, a great place to meet other cyclists is by volunteering here at the Hub or taking our Adult Mechanic Classes.
Alright, so that is the real quick and easy of what we do. It gets a little more involved, but I don’t want to overwhelm you with how great we are, so I’ll stop there now. But what a great word – involved? Lets talk about how you can get involved!:
- Come to our Progressive Dinner By Bicycle Event: On Sunday, the 19th of August we will be having our third Progressive Dinner by Bicycle event. $30 gets you a nice ride around the city with the best company ever. Along the ride we will stop 5 times to sample food by some of Detroit’s best food vendors. The profits help benefit our youth programming here at the Hub. Make sure to register by August 12th! Registration is available online here.
- Donate: We always need used bicycles. In fact we are in the middle of a bike drive right now to get 300 bikes by September 1st. If you don’t have a bike to give, we will always accept cash donations, those are the best. Also, as mentioned above, donating your time as a volunteer is never a bad thing. For more information about donations, check out this part of our website.
- Shop: Did I mention we have a retail shop? If you need bike parts, a new to you bike or a tune up – consider shopping in our store!
- Participate: If you are between the ages of 8 and 16 years old you are eligible for our Youth Programs. If you are older than that, you can come to our Adult Mechanic Classes.