Community Bikes!

How can students give back to the community using the skills they are learning in our professionally run bike shop?

Embark 7th and 8th graders came up with an idea to put their new skills to use. They reached out to local elementary schools and shared their idea for a bike repair day. Email letters, explaining the Embark student’s idea to give back, were drafted, edited, and sent to each of the contacts. The idea involved Embark students going to a local elementary school on a given day. Students of the school would bring their broken-down bikes to the school. Embark students would bring our tools, bike stands, and extra parts to the school and service the bikes that were brought in for repair. This service would be free of charge.

Several of the students reached out to the school they had attended--Sandoval Elementary, as a potential partner for the repair day. A teacher from Knapp Elementary School, who had connections with “Wishes on Wheels” had reached out to Embark last year and had asked about partnering with us on a project. After COVID hit, the connection was lost. The students thought it might be a good idea to reach out to this teacher as well about their community project idea. The students did reach out to the Knapp school. Both of the schools we reached out to responded positively and are excited to work with Embark students on this community project.

After brainstorming for several ideas as to what the repair day would look like, several concerns came to the surface. Questions like: What if we get too many bikes? What if the repairs are too difficult? What if the repairs are too expensive for us to repair?

To address these questions and ensure a successful repair day, we decided to ask the schools to inform their families about this project and tell them to sign up in advance for the repair day. This would let our students know just how many requests were being made and the families really interested in the free repair would make a commitment to bring their bike in and then take it home. If there were too many requests, another repair day could be set up. In the letter to families, we’d be sure to communicate the kinds of repairs we can perform. The repairs would be minor.

Two Embark students had a Zoom meeting with the contact at Sandoval to start the planning process. Our first step will be to decide on a date this spring for the event. Embark students will create a digital flyer with all the information on it for the schools to distribute to their families. We will be meeting again after spring break to work on the next steps together. We are in communication with the Knapp School also and look forward to working with them on the next steps after spring break.

Embark students had already been practicing some basic repairs skills on the fleet bikes we received from the Golden Optimist Club. Now, we really focused on each of the “tune-up” skills that we would need to perform on those repair days set later this spring. We practiced these skills on the bikes we were receiving from the Optimist club. The Club drops off a set of bikes for the students to repair every few weeks. After the repairs are made, the bikes are picked up and brought back to the Golden Optimist Club. This is part of the work of Framework to build community connections. You can see the pride in Embark students’ faces and hear it in their voices when they talk about the bike that they have just fixed.