Some stuff

• Garage night schedule This Weds (tomorrow, Dec 19th) will be the last garage night of the year. We’ll be starting up again in Jan on Weds nights only. In March, our goal is 3 nights a week.

• The Scoop Photo Show The photos look great. All up, we got about 60 submissions; so far we’ve sold a handful. If you are kicking yourself for not submitting, then we’ll take a few more, but you must print them at 8×10 and bring them by the Scoop at 25th and Monroe.

• Free Bike Tune Ups We need to start planning our free bike tune ups for next year. The plan is one a month (March – Sept) in different parts of the city. We’re looking for under served folks, especially kids that can’t otherwise afford to get their bikes fixed up. If you have an area/organization/spot where you think we should be, email John at johnspeare@gmail.com.

• Organizational Goo We’ve been getting through the paperwork to prepare us for the 501(c)(3); we’ve talked to an attorney about liability; we’ve put in for some quotes for liability insurance; we’ve created articles of incorporation and bylaws; we’ve stared at a blank sheet of paper that should be a business plan. This is the stuff that none of us wants to do. The expense and overhead of dealing with the back office stuff is just hugely time consuming. We’re now going back to the idea of seeking out an umbrella org to work under; or in non-profit-speak, we are seeking Fiscal Sponsorship — ahem.

• Spring Dream A while back we posted the plan. As I read that now, I really like the Phase 1 stuff. It’s really what we want to be. The only change to that is that we’d like to get a space closer to downtown. Our donated garage is so sweet and so perfect a space. It’s the right size, it’s got everything we need, but it’s too far from the core of the city. We would love to find a space closer in; if we found that then the only change to our Phase 1 plan would be to add a “DIY” component to our program,where folks could come in and rent a workbench and do their own bike work.

This concept relies,obviously, on a space 1st, but it also relies on building up a strong core of volunteers that can staff a shop. We’re getting there. We’ve got some really good folks showing up regularly and who are skilled in different ways — some are bike wrenchy types, some are people people, some are just hard, autonomous workers. I think we’ll have enough folks to do at least 3 nights a week in the Spring and who knows, maybe a part of a weekend day too.

• Village Bike Project We finally sucked up and bought a trailer for P2P. This will allow us to stack bikes and do small runs out to Mountain Gear HQ without relying on guys with big trucks. We’ll likely do another push for bikes in Feb or so; at that point it would be great to be able to pick up bikes for some of the folks that call, so if you are a guy or a gal with a little truck and could do one run a month for us, we’d take it. Right now we have about 50 bikes at Mountain Gear and our goal is 500 by the end of the next summer. So we’ve got a lot of work to do.

• Bike To Work Week Our big outreach event this year is going to be the Bike to Work Week event. Last year we did the KHQ Kid’s Bike deal. The Bike to Work event is right up our alley: it’s all about getting folks that might otherwise not ride a bike past the hump, and on a bike getting to work. We’ll be doing some kind of pre-week events where we help triage bikes and fix minor issues. We also plan to be out in the field on one or two days during the week to fix issues, hand out scones, etc to commuters.