Help more OCBC volunteers become pro bike mechanics!

The Ohio City Bicycle Co-op is a volunteer-driven, cooperative bicycle education center offering riding and repair classes, hands-on learning and shop credit for volunteering, fully refurbished bikes for sale or rent, and public shop use and repair assistance.  Co-op purchases and program fees, along with grants and donations, support bicycle safety education programs in our shop, and in the broader community in partnerships with schools, businesses, social service agencies, and other organizations.

The long range goal of this project is to alleviate "bike repair deserts" -- neighborhoods without a bike shop close enough to walk (or take one bus) to, with a broken bike.  For ten years or so OCBC has been offering "fixathons" in bike repair desert neighborhoods here; helping residents (mostly kids, but many adults too) to fix their bikes and learn how to keep them running themselves.  Many of these folks are “necessity cyclists” -- in the Central neighborhood, for example, 78% of residents have no access to a car.

Our informal, ten-hour Shop Class series has taught hundreds of people how to tune up their own bikes, and trained all of our many Key Volunteers – at least a dozen of whom have gone on to bike shop jobs. But it is time to step up the pace, and offer a more structured track with real mentorship and feedback for those who want to grow into an important part of this community’s bicycle renaissance.

Sending Al, our head mechanic, to Barnett Bicycle Institute is a necessary first step: he is an excellent mechanic, but anyone can always learn more, and we need to also learn how the most highly regarded bicycle tech training program in the country is run. We are thankful to Cleveland Neighborhood Progress for covering the majority of his tuition for this two week course, and full day of certification testing.

Curriculum development is something that is ongoing for us, but student evaluation (with quizzes and tests) is not something we have done much of, so this will be the big part of our work on this project. Fortunately, we have some great volunteers, partners and friends who do do that work all the time – so we aren’t asking you to pay for any of that.

Refurnishing the work shop is the part everyone will see; and the shiny, clean part that will make all those involved feel special.  It is also the expensive part, and the part that will have the biggest immediate impact: we have been limping along with the same six motley tool sets and mish-mosh of workstands for the last 15 years, and it shows.

Cleveland is becoming a good place to bike. Decades of advocacy work have produced a growing network of bike infrastructure from the City, finally almost keeping pace with a ballooning ridership: bike counts on the two main cross-town bridges have doubled each of the past three years.  Also, after decades of out-migration, Cleveland is starting to see rising numbers of downtown residents.

Over the last fifteen years, several new bike shops have opened in the suburbs, but the city of Cleveland itself has had a net loss of shops in that time.  If we are going to keep adding more cyclists (a great thing for the city, our air and water, and the climate!) we will need more bike shops, and more bike mechanics.  And we will need them close to where young new city residents, who like to bike, are choosing to live -- which is, conveniently, also near many of our bike repair deserts, in the neighborhoods with the greatest numbers of necessity cyclists.

To build real resilience in our communities and capacity into our transportation system, we (the people of Cleveland) need bike shops in the city.  To get there, we (the OCBC) are developing an apprenticeship program with performance metrics and meaningful feedback, so we can certify that individuals have the basic skills and experience needed to get work in a bike shop -- or, hopefully, to start a bike co-op in their own neighborhood with surplus bikes and parts from OCBC, and support from our community partner organizations.