The Salt Lake City Bicycle Collective recently rescued a corporate bike building project. The team building exercise didn't quite work out as planned, and dozens of the bikes were left unbuilt and the quality of the bike builds the did get done was questionable. The Collective came in and ensure that each bike was safe and well built. Although we got $10 per bike to check over the bikes and build a few, it seemed to be an income loss and our staff was less than pleased with having to track down ghosts in the machines. Perhaps better quality bicycles would have made a difference.

In any case, there are significant liability issues for organizations that assemble bikes. I think the corporations should partner with bicycle cooperatives and collectives to ensure a high quality final product, could be a win-win. But, the co-op partners need to be fairly compensated.

On a related note, I think that building a bicycle as a team building exercise might have significantly different appeal and connection depending on a person's background. There's a lot of opportunity for someone (often male) with mechanical knowledge to dominate the group. We have women's bike mechanics nights to address this barrier.

Kevin Dwyer SLC Bicycle Collective Board Member

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On Mar 14, 2014, at 2:54 PM, Adonia Lugo adonia.lugo@gmail.com wrote:

Thanks all for sharing your thoughts, I really appreciate it. I will be reporting these pros and cons next week, so feel free to keep sending em to me.

-- Adonia E. Lugo, Ph.D. Bicycle Anthropologist www.urbanadonia.com

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On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 4:34 PM, Henry Dunbar henry@phoenixbikes.org wrote: I think each local group will need to tailor these to get what they can. I could see the League as being a broker to match up Corporations with local youth programs. Then the onus is on them to cultivate the relationship.

We did this last year with a major construction company. We actually asked them to do the exercise with adult bikes that were donated to us to put in our sale stock. They still had to be gone over by youth and staff mechanics as a quality control check, so the kids learned from the experience, and got the rare (at least in our shop) chance to work on new bikes. Plus we benefited from the revenue boost of getting 12 very gently used bikes to sell, and started a great relationship with a company that we hope will pay dividends later.

I agree with Karen that we're not about just giving bikes to kids.

-- Henry T. Dunbar Executive Director Phoenix Bikes 703.575.7762 Shop 703.517.5017 Cell phoenixbikes.org

We are One of the Best, as featured in the 2012-13 Catalogue for Philanthropy.

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