Alright ya’ll,
I have something very exciting to talk about. I’ve probably mentioned it before, but this weekend Heather, Sarai, Trevon and myself will be headed to New York City for the third Youth Bike Summit put on by Recycle-a-Bicycle. Okay, that was a big sentence if you aren’t in our little isolated bike world, so lets break this down to tell you who all the players are:
1) Heather: Volunteer coordinator, Mechanic-in-Training instructor, Adult Mechanic Class teacher, donations coordinator…Heather does so many things and is 1/2 of the Back Alley Bikes staff team.
2) Sarai: River Rouge High School Senior and Mechanic-in-Training student from 2012.
3) Trevon: Cody High School student and Mechanic-in-Training student from 2012.
4) Me (Jason): Program coordinator and 1/2 of Back Alley Bikes staff team. The person who writes all this great stuff for you to read!
5) Youth Bike Summit: A summit to bring youth and community bike shop workers together to improve our work and empower youth to take a leading role in it all. Each year they have a teenager as one of the keynote speakers. This summit walks the walk okay?
6) Recycle-a-Bicycle: A community bicycle shop in New York City that services the community much like Back Alley Bikes does in Detroit. They do things a little differently, but are definitely part of the same world of reusing bicycles, teaching youth and being awesome while doing it.
Okay, now that we are kind of on the same page here I hope you are as excited as I. Let me break down a little more what we hope to accomplish by going to this summit:
1) For the first time, connecting Back Alley Bikes youth leadership with youth leadership from around the nation (and the world).
2) Get some of our kids out of Detroit for the weekend and see something a little different.
3) Have our youth take this experience and generate suggestions on how Back Alley Bikes can work with youth better.
4) Establish a new tradition as a first step towards empowering our youth to take a leading position at Back Alley Bikes.
5) For Heather and I to get more ideas and learn from others in our small community on how to make Back Alley Bikes the best it can be.
I think it will be worth it. If you aren’t as excited about “strategic planning”, “youth empowerment” and other such buzz words as I am, let me try again to get you more excited. I’m going to get our resident cell phone addict, Sarai, to live-tweet from the summit.
This is partially because I barely know what “live-tweet” means (so I’m not doing it), but also so folks back here in Detroit can get a look at what the conference is like as we are doing it. So if you do that twitter thing, follow @BackAlleyBikes (which you should just do anyhow). But make sure to follow Sarai’s thoughts and comments Feb 15th-17th.
Finally, I gotta give you one more list. This is the thanks for folks that have made this trip possible:
1) The BUCK Dinner Fund
2) Hostel Detroit
3) Participants of our Progressive Dinner by Bicycle events in 2012
Thanks everyone! We’ll have more great news when we return!
Sarai Doss – Mechanic-in-Training from Hub Detroit on Vimeo.