Dear Think Tank!
Big news from New York City: it's my pleasure to introduce you to the New York Mechanical Gardens / El Jardín Mecánico, the city's first true bike co-op. We've been quietly organizing over the last few months, and as of Saturday we've reached an agreement with a grassroots community center in a church in Brooklyn. We plan to open doors on April 1. Things are about to get real in NYC!
We need your help in a couple of easy ways: follow us on all the social medias, and we'll do the same back, and this will help us (a) build a local community by sharing good content, (b) demonstrate our viability in some weird way to potential funders. We're @bikecoopnyc at FB https://www.facebook.com/bikecoopnyc, Twitter https://twitter.com/bikecoopnyc, and Insta https://www.instagram.com/bikecoopnyc/, on the web at www.bikecoop.nyc, and emailable at bikecoopnyc@gmail.com. (Spanish translation is on the way for the site, and we aim for all our outgoing materials to be bilingual.) We also are eager to see your examples of good bylaws or decision-making rubrics -- we don't want to get too far down the road without having a structure for making decisions, figuring out membership, etc. Finally, if you have an amazing suggestion for a seedling co-op like ours about fundraising or soliciting donations or supplies, please share!
This message is more than an announcement: it's also a love letter to everyone on this forum. The Mechanical Gardens would never have started planting a single seed here if it weren't for your inspiration, optimism, and friendship.
I'd been convinced for years that NYC has too much going against us for it work out here -- chiefly that real estate works differently than anywhere else on the planet, and people's time is a different kind of commodity too. But I got back from B!B! this year really reinvigorated to start a co-op, and more aware of how much it takes a community of people to make a project happen. Soon after I returned, I made up my mind to start this story fresh, and then found that Sera and Aaron from Rag & Bones had just moved here for grad school, and that Courtney and Arnold from Krank It Up were working at a shop in town, and that a few other folks I talked to also had co-op backgrounds -- or got stars in their eyes when we started talking about making one happen here. So suddenly the dream became a team, and then we were figuring things out together -- and now we've got a space to start working in. Hot damn.
We can't wait for the first season at the Mechanical Gardens, and are filled with gratitude to you for all the lovely fruit our boughs will come to bear.
Big love,
Josh The New York Mechanical Gardens El Jardín Mecánico