I'm here in Austin Texas where the future is looking strong for Austin's Bike Collective Community. With the help of The Austin Yellow Bike Project and a non-profit student housing cooperative, College Houses Inc. we are building a community shop from the ground up, raised from the earth for the sole purpose of providing a space for the people to learn the mysteries of the bicycle. We are still raising money to get a few more tools on the shelf. Check out the recent press and please spread the message to all interested parties. front page! http://www.dailytexanonline.com/21st-street-co-op-expands-bike-shop-1.174446... more about us and a PayPal account courtesy of the wonderful folks at Yellow Bike. http://www.austinyellowbike.org/shop_21st_street.htm Come and see us sometime here in Austin, -Will Wolfe --- On Tue, 5/12/09, rachael spiewak rachael@sopobikes.org wrote:
From: rachael spiewak rachael@sopobikes.org Subject: Re: [TheThinkTank] Collaborations between your organization and others? To: "The Think Tank" thethinktank@bikecollectives.org Date: Tuesday, May 12, 2009, 2:55 PM
Here are a few:
International Rescue Committee -- they send us teenage interns from their job readiness program. This is one of our favorite partnerships. One of our first IRC interns made our documentary, which helped us score grant $$ and helps make new shop participants feel like they already know us (oh, you're the girl from the video I watched!), and he's working on creating a community bike shop in Clarkston (where IRC and a bunch of other refugee and immigrant resettlement services agencies are located, so you can imagine how powerful a community bike shop would be in that town).
Metro Atlanta Taskforce for the Homeless -- we got a bike shop going in their facility through their onsite Americorps program and with the help of another one of our teen interns. There's kind of a long story about a Whole Foods 5% Day/store boycott that has to do with this project buried in our blog.
Atlanta Bike Coalition -- here's one for partnering with your local bike advocacy organization. We work together all the time on whatever it is that we're up to. A good example would be a blinky light giveaway put on by ABC that took place at Sopo. We also use each other's communication channels to get the word out about events and issues that should cut across memberships.
Morehouse College's Office of Community Service -- we started recruiting our summer Youth Mentors through this office.
Wonderroot Community Arts Center -- we have our meetings at this facility, they put on benefits for us in their show space, we're borrowing their veggie oil bus to get to Bike!Bike! this year, we help each other with nonprofit management issues, and more.
Other area co-ops -- most of them are good about including us at networking luncheons at the food co-op, radio shows about co-ops on our community radiostation, collecting donations for us (REI mostly), etc.
Hope that helps!! Rachael//Sopo
On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 9:07 PM, veganboyjosh@gmail.com wrote:
Howdy all,
Hope the spring to summer transition is greeting all of you with good weather and lots of competent willing volunteers to handle the influx of traffic....
I'd love to hear about collaborations you've found with outside organizations, either bike related or not. What potential sources for programming and resources have you come across? I'm interested in hearing both successes and failures.
Thanks!
josh Community Cycles Boulder, CO
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This Spring the Recyclery moved from our basement in Evanston, Illinois
to a storefront in Chicago. One of the first things we did during our storefront prep (almost done after 2 months) was put a rather long sign up in the window explaining who we were, giving some history and stressing that we wanted to be a part of the neighborhood. Since then we've met with several neighborhood organizations, including summer youth programming as well as (hopefully) an adult ESL program and a women's shelter in the neighborhood. Our reasoning for this was twofold: first, we were moving into a new community, into an above-ground storefront where we would no longer be a secret open to few folks outside the cycling community. We also recognized our potential effect on the already gentrifying neighborhood if we were perceived as an organization that existed primarily to serve white cycling culture(s). second, our overhead with the move is increasing about 1000%, from basically nothing to a significant (though still a song) bundle of rent, utilities, insurance, etc. So far, we remain a primarily volunteer-run organization, even among the majority of the collective body itself. Our reasoning follows that there is no better pool of people to draw a volunteer base from than our surrounding community. The bike people know about us and will come on their own. By reaching out to (and responding to the reach-outs of) local organizations, my hope is that The Recyclery will be better able to integrate itself into our new community. We are trying to take a more proactive role in determining our own place in the neighborhood, but also recognizing that there was a neighborhood here before we arrived--we don't need to reinvent the wheel or pull a volunteer base out of thin air when nobody even knows who we are (although the sign has helped TONS). It has been a tremendous help to us to just recognize that so much of what we need is already around.
thethinktank@lists.bikecollectives.org
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Erik Stockmeier -
Will Wolfe