The Bradley Street Bicycle Co-op’s 2016 Annual Report
New Haven can be thought of in two ways. So often, I hear that New Haven is unsafe and unequal, and theft and discrimination dominate the city’s story. But while working in New Haven, I so often see the exact opposite. I see a city that is alive, proud, interested, and unrelentingly passionate about itself. In reality, New Haven is made up of what we hear and what we see; I want to be a part of building a better narrative for our city.
I opened the Bradley Street Bicycle Co-op in late 2015 with a pile of bike tools, a dirty shop, and an endless supply of questions. How do I fix 100 bikes in a year? When is the best time for the shop to be open? How do I keep the lights on? How can the Co-op be a relevant business in the 21st century? What color should my sign be? How do I make an invoice? What do I do when someone asks me something I don’t know? What is the Co-op’s place in our city?
I launched the Co-op into its first year with a relentless answering of “yes” to everything that came across my plate. The Co-op helped celebrate Bike Month. It hosted a wide array of events, repair clinics, movie viewings, and talks. It fought for change in institutions and built relationships across the city. It fixed and donated bikes for people who need them. It gained over 50 members, and supported nonprofits, schools, programs, and institutions. And most importantly, it brought people together to work towards a common goal.
I am proud of the breadth of work accomplished in the Bradley Street Bicycle Co-op’s first year in existence, and even more proud of the people who helped make it happen. But I am most proud that we came together to define a common goal for the Co-op: to make New Haven a better place.
In its second year, the Bradley Street Bicycle Co-op will build an environment where you can:
- Learn bike maintenance
- Give back by volunteering
- Share ideas and make friends
The Co-op is not really a bike shop. We do not take your bike, fix it, and trade it back to you for money. Instead, we embrace all the other pieces of bike maintenance. We embrace the challenge, the greasy hands, the beauty of the “dumb questions” (there is no such thing!), the annoying abundance of tools, the power of making mistakes, the fun of seeing your hard work pay off, and the empowering feeling of learning something new.
We are going to work hard to make people excited about the opportunity of a broken bike!
If our members get a taste of this feeling, our volunteers live it. The Bradley Street Bicycle Co-op’s recycling program, BEEEP (Bicycle Education, Entrepreneurship, and Enrichment Programs), sources, repairs, and distributes bikes to those who need them in New Haven. The average annual operating cost of a bicycle is $308 — versus $8,220 for the average car. This simple statistic illustrates how bikes empower people who cannot afford a car. This is why we volunteer our time, this is why we built this program, and this is what we will continue to address in the future.
The recycling program will be the engine that drives the Co-op forward. It will provide revenue to keep the lights on through donor support and the sales of used bikes. It will also continue to be the way our volunteers participate. Volunteers are the lifeblood of the Co-op; they are the ones who know the space and tools, who help others out, who fix bikes for those who need them in our city, and who donate their time. Through their work, they gain stake in their community; they get to see the bikes they fixed make a difference.
In 2016, 35 individual donors and organizations gave more than 300 bikes, of which more than 200 were repaired and turned around by 25 volunteer mechanics during the course of the year.
That is an incredible amount of donated time and money that was leveraged to make an incredible difference. Those 200 bikes are back on our streets moving us through our city in a healthy, sustainable, and empowering way. In 2017, we want to double that number.
In the sign hanging on the wall inside, I describe the Co-op as a place to “grab a seat, read, write the next great American novel, DJ for us, bring us cookies, use the wifi, whatever you want!.” While I take the cookies part seriously, what I really mean is that the Co-op is a safe environment to hear and value one another. The people of New Haven are incredible, and there is a deep desire to share and learn from each other. We have someone who teaches yoga once a week in the space, someone who leads a women’s ride from the shop on Friday mornings, someone who is coordinating a New Haven based documentary series shown in the shop, and a group of people who came together and crowdfund a basketball hoop for outside.
But people also just come to hang out. And we want more of that.
It may be something overlooked, but a safe, casual, free space to meet people and share ideas has authentic value and power. This value is something deeply important not just to our branding, but to our ethos as well. These are the spaces where we can meet one another and see New Haven for what it is, not for what people say it is. These spaces are the battlegrounds for change in our city. And the Bradley Street Bicycle Co-op is proud to be one of the spaces where we come together as a whole and embrace that fact.
2016 saw major growth at the Bradley Street Bicycle Co-op. Through this growth, our direction became clearer and our goals became stronger. Above all, the Co-op strives to make New Haven a better place. We are going to focus on what we see in our city, and share the passion and love with everyone who walks (or rides) through our door.
