Andy,

so are you giving away bikes that are already repaired or still in need of repair?

we do two kids bikes (coaster brake only) giveaways a year, at new years time and in June at an annual local festival. we stockpile them all and then do a work party to ready about 50-70 each time.

your list of pros and cons is a good one and a lot of the same issues we grapple with. we have $5 bikes that are basically repaired walmart bikes and those are sometimes given away to someone who needs a bike but cant afford that.

we are currently going through a big culling process where we are closing shop for a week and just working on pulling out bikes we will never have time to work on and are just taking space. some will be given away in bulk and moved off site, and others will be scrapped.

Andrew

Troy Bike Rescue

On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 2:33 PM, Andrew Shooner <ashooner@gmail.com> wrote:

We typically reach our storage capacity of donated bikes around this time of year. Our process is to assess and price bikes before selling them (cash or volunteer equity), but we can get gridlocked if we have too many incoming donations. We're considering an annual bike giveaway, and I'm looking for some wisdom/experience. My pros and cons list for a giveaway event for un-assessed donations:

Pros
Expose more public to the shop
Clear out bikes that are a physical and mental burden on the volunteers
Redistribute more bikes! (part of our mission)

Cons
Breaks our principle of earned equity vs hand-out.
Would likely lead to redistributing bikes that we'll need to work on anyway.
Along the same lines, could hurt our rep if we give away broken or dangerous bikes.
Could still leave us with the bottom-of-the-barrel bikes.

Does anyone have a consistent method for managing bike capacity? My gut tells me we should just commit to a bike-count, and stick with it. Then we can hone our process for pulling the wheat from the chaff on an ongoing basis.

-Andy
Brok Spoke, Lexington

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andrew lynn 518-573-7947