Hey everyone,
So we got a new website if you didn’t notice. We’ve been pretty busy at the shop working on bikes and whatnot so we haven’t had much time to advertise it. So I’m taking this lazy Sunday afternoon to catch some of you up on a little bit of good news.
We are doing are best to pretend we are adults who are organized and in 2009 and 2010 we began to try to keep the best records we could as far as volunteer hours, number of youth working in our Earn-a-Bike program and other numbers. We had some good numbers last year, like our over 3,000 volunteer hours from 2010 which I shared in a post last December.
Well, this year I began to work with our Youth Earn-a-Bike program more and started doing some data entry this Spring. Yesterday I checked our total and we’ve gotten over 160 bikes out the door to youth in Detroit. This number counts all the donated bikes completed and taken home by youth in the Earn-a-Bike program. It also takes into account the approximately 60 bikes given out during our Bike Give-a-Way for youth under the age of 8.
This number does not count the number of bikes that went out the door this past winter and early spring in Earn-a-Bike. It also does not count for the number of bikes that Youth have brought with them to repair during Earn-a-Bike. Many youth that participate in the program bring their damaged bikes from home and we teach them how to get those bikes rolling again and replace broken parts if needed. If these bikes were included in the count, it would be well over 200 easy.
Lets not forget that this also means there are over 200 folks out there that parted with an old bike from their basement or garage so we could continue doing the programming we do. We couldn’t do any of this programming without the donations we receive, so thank you.
With all that said, I also want to give you a sneak peek of some events we have coming up. We’ve come up with some really fun events to carry us all through summer into fall:
- The first event will be our 3rd annual Safe Streets Youth Ride coming up on August 20th. There should be news coming about that event very soon, so keep an eye open for it.
- Then we will be attempting our first ever Progressive Dinner ride in September which should be great. Riding a bike plus eating food made by local groups equals a good time.
- To cap off a three month run of events as business slows down in October we are going to clean out the upstairs warehouse and have a Concert upstairs in our bike jungle. Hopefully bands playing in our most visually interesting space sounds appealing to some of you.
All of these events will be fund raisers to sustain what we do. So keep an eye on this website and if you are connected, join our facebook group and all that to see how you can participate. There will be more information coming soon! See you all then!
– jason x