Hi Nicole,

I'm the Executive Director of BikeAthens here in Athens GA. I've been the administrator for our Earn A Bike Program for over five years. We use social service partners in our area to refer clients to us that need transportation.

How do you avoid means testing? You do that by letting it be someone else's job. In theory, you and the other collective members are a) excited about bikes and b) have other jobs and responsibilities that don't revolve around being full-time social workers. I don't decide who gets a bike. I just decide which one they get. The referring organization does the heavy lifting by having interviewed and worked with the potential client. Often they are licensed social workers to some extent or another. They are in a much better position to make that judgment call. It also gives me an easy way out of the conversation when a random person shows up telling me that they heard if they come down here they can get a free bike. I even have a pamphlet I give them that explains our referral process.

We have a very low threshold for what types of organizations we partner with. Any reasonably legit third party that is willing to email or call on behalf of someone they know that needs a bike is in. That is to say, pretty much any 501c3 non-profit, school or church organization can send a request on behalf of a client. Our expectations are just that they believe that having a bike would help their client better find a job, get to school, and access social services or healthcare. We don't require an MOU unless they want one. Some partner organizations have their own criteria for whether or not they will send us a request. For example, the Salvation Army in Athens will only send a referral if the client already has a job. A local addiction recovery organization requires the client to sign a contract that they will take care of the bike, keep it locked, and return it if they are no longer using it. If the partner organization would like to protect a client's identity, that's fine. They can make up a client number or send me initials. As long as they tell me how tall they are, we're good.

You may not have the same community partners over time, there is decent turnover in a lot of other social service organizations and sometimes new people aren't aware they can even help their clients find help with bikes.

Let me know if that is helpful or if you have any other questions.

Thanks

Scott

On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 4:54 PM Nicole Muratore nicole@bikesaviours.org wrote:

The last iteration of ours required an individual to volunteer 12 hours of time in exchange for a bike we'd teach them to fix up, a set of lights, and a lock. These folks are already facing transportation issues and have difficulty returning to the shop to complete the hours they started.

Separate from earn-a-bike we offer work trade at a rate of $10/hour for shop credit that can be used for stand time or regular-priced parts needed to fix one's bike.

If your shop has an earn-a-bike program or similar, how does it work? And is utilization of the program high? Any input, documentation, etc. is appreciated!

Cheers, *Nicole Muratore, Shop Manager* (she/her) Bike Saviours Bicycle Collective (602) 429-9369 | bikesaviours.org | @bikesaviours ____________________________________

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Hi Nicole,

At RIBs, for many years, we had similar requirements to those you describe for your shop. At one point we also had a different, simpler system, wherein the applicant was required to fix up one bike for someone else in order to be allowed to fix up one bike for themselves.

What we found was exactly what you have found, which was that the highest need groups found both of these bars too high to reach. In many cases, the policy was also seen as unfriendly: some people needing the resource were in an especially high state of life stress, as well as being subject to social ostracism generally, and being told they must not only navigate this difficult learning curve, but do work that didn't further their own immediate (read: urgent) needs was, frankly, inconsiderate. Even though we at the shop were good people only trying to help, we just didn't understand.

So the lesson was that higher order concepts like community development and mutual aid aren't really great to evangelize to people undergoing crisis. In kind, that we in the shop had bad calibration wrt what represented crisis. We might have thought of it as extreme things such as "are you being evicted" or "have you lost housing because your partner threatened your life and your only other housing options are with substance abusing people you had been trying to separate yourself from because you are trying to stay clean to regain legal custody of your children", but in reality significant states of crisis can be much more insidious and mundane. Someone can be in a state of significant, ongoing crisis simply because they are disrespected at their job and their childcare involves significant emotional burden, and they feel unloved in their partner relationship. Crisis can be difficult to recognize for someone not familiar with it, especially where it stems from conditions such as generational poverty and trauma. And crisis isn't necessarily a transitory state. It can last for most or all of a person's life, especiallly where generational effects are involved.

So what we did was entirely remove our requirements for volunteering in return for use of the space, and replaced them with only a pay-what-you-want requirement for parts and a polite reminder that we accept donations.

What we saw was a dramatic reduction in ghosting. Nearly all participants of every demographic returned to complete their projects. A rough guess would be that around 2% abandoned projects they started, most of those being students with busy academic/social schedules or hobbyists who lost interest in a frivolous idea. Over the four years we had these relaxed policies, nearly all in-need participants completed their bikes (or repairs) and left with safe and satisfying wheels under them.

This higher rate of effectiveness did come at a cost, however. When we had volunteer requirements, it did force a lot more people to stay and be part of the environment for longer periods of time, contributing to shop culture and character. Requirements also forced kids to learn: most of the street-level kids in our community don't stay and learn unless they are made to. In these cases the reward-incentive-for-work concept seems to be something that must be imposed, rather than guided or facilitated, in order to take root. So though we retained significant child attendance in the case of those visiting with various guardians, we also lost a lot (actually most) of our solo child participation by removing requirements.

In general, I'd say our volunteer community was reduced by about half by these measures, with only people who volunteered out of passion and joy remaining. Our shop was small and had never really run on exclusively volunteer labor except at the beginning (thirty years ago) when it was even smaller and being run out of random garages, so this wasn't a lethal change for us. It did create much greater demands/stress on paid staff and primary volunteers.

I think it's possible to not go entirely one way or another, for instance to have volunteer requirements for children but not adults (though it might be painful to justify to kids who noticed the disparity), or create tiers of service/use some of which would required volunteering. We just basically treated the shop as a library and the staff and primary volunteers as librarians, and let the community use the space so long as they did so without harming it.

An idea for a tier of access that could require volunteer hours might be keyed off-hours access. This is really only sustainable now with the advent of [more] affordable electronic locks - in the past people with keys made copies, kept them essentially forever, and any abuse would require changing the locks. I'd encourage shop budget to be spent on this kind of lock, or even the more expensive mechanical versions, even though it involves significant expense. In retrospect, it was the lack of this investment that prevented us from exploring options such as the one suggested above, and eventually we were making enough money that we could have afforded it. It's so difficult to see every option in every moment when you're busy af with so many things.

~cyclista Nicholas

On 2022-01-11 21:54, Nicole Muratore wrote:

The last iteration of ours required an individual to volunteer 12 hours of time in exchange for a bike we'd teach them to fix up, a set of lights, and a lock. These folks are already facing transportation issues and have difficulty returning to the shop to complete the hours they started.

Separate from earn-a-bike we offer work trade at a rate of $10/hour for shop credit that can be used for stand time or regular-priced parts needed to fix one's bike.

If your shop has an earn-a-bike program or similar, how does it work? And is utilization of the program high? Any input, documentation, etc. is appreciated!

Cheers, *Nicole Muratore, Shop Manager* (she/her) Bike Saviours Bicycle Collective (602) 429-9369 | bikesaviours.org | @bikesaviours

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