TO DENNIS FISER, the bike is a reason to get dirty. “Look at this,” he says. His grin shows off his missing teeth. Fiser holds up his hands, blackened by grease and cracked from working. “I like being covered in grease and WD-40 and getting my hands on all these tools,” he says before scratching his nose, leaving a black smudge on his wrinkled face.
Fiser, bundled in his parka in the unheated warehouse, fiddles with the chain on the used bike he’s repairing. He’s surrounded by six other volunteer mechanics, all wearing winter coats, all concentrating on the used bikes in front of them, all clearly loving it. One laughs as he dismantles the brakes on a bright green Schwinn. Another starts spinning the pedals of a rusted Cannondale, humming along to the Irish folk music faintly playing through an old boombox.
These are the mechanics for the Working Bike Cooperative, a Chicago-based group that recycles bicycles. The not-for-profit, whose storefront is located at 1125 S. Western Ave, refurbishes and donates thousands of used bikes to the needy in Chicago and around the world, to sites like Cuba, Angola, Nicaragua and New Orleans.
The group is almost entirely volunteer-run, from the mechanics in the warehouse to the salespeople in the storefront where they sell half the remade bikes — the ones they don’t give away. Those at the WBC aren’t just people who ride bikes; they’re bike people. They’re the ones who ride 20 miles to work in the middle of January, the ones who stop on a busy street to tighten a wheel, the ones who don’t own a pair of pants that hasn’t been torn up by their chain, the ones who would dedicate their Saturday afternoons to fixing a bike they’ll never ride. The group includes street punks and insurance agents; everyone is united by the bike.
To LEE RAVENSCROFT, the bike isn’t something to throw away. Ravenscroft, a 57-year-old retiree, founded the WBC in 1998. He doesn’t look like a saintly figure, the one who changes the lives of thousands of people every year. He’s just a genial former electrical engineer who speaks through mouthfuls of pizza. He’s wearing a ratty green fleece jacket adorned with a single yellow pin with the WBC logo, a set of gears with the name of the group written on them.
Ravenscroft’s appearance is nothing compared to the unflattering way he describes his group. “We live like freegans,” he says. “You know, dumpster divers. We live off the fat of the land. We’re basically a recycling organization.”
It’s coincidental that Ravenscroft would call his group a recycling organization, since it got its start at a recycling center. “I saw all these bikes being thrown away,” he says. “So I started going to recycling centers and buying the bikes right off the trucks.”
He sold them out of the basement of a Pilsen flat before he realized the bikes would get far more use and love if they were recycled and sent abroad. “A used bike costs $100 in Nicaragua, but the people only make $500 a year. That’s one-fifth of their income for a bike,” he says.
So he started refurbishing the junk bikes and sending them to Nicaragua, a country where he had done philanthropic work in the past. Three years later, he moved into the current warehouse, a space above a muffler shop.
Now the WBC has a volunteer listserv with 741 members. The organization doesn’t buy bikes off of garbage trucks anymore. They get so many donations they don’t know what to do with all the bikes that come in. They send out about 5,000 a year and sell about 2,000. All the money they need to send the bikes abroad comes from their sales, and they have more than enough: They don’t even seek cash donations.
TO JESSE HAUTAU, the bike needs a new brake. Hautau is another of today’s mechanics, the most common and important of WBC’s volunteer corps. Hautau, his bushy red beard covering some of his piercings, wipes his hands on a filthy rag while he tinkers with the old road bike on the stand. He is one of the WBC’s three paid mechanics who help out the volunteers and ensure a professional hand touches every bike that passes through the warehouse.
The warehouse, located at 927 S. Western Ave, is easy to miss. The only entrance is a nondescript door next to the garage of a muffler repair shop, marked only by a handwritten sign and a pink children’s bike.
Upstairs, dozens of old bikes are stacked up, leaning on a wall tagged with graffiti that says “Checked Bikes.” Among those bikes are a green Schwinn, a pink roadster and a navy blue mountain bike, waiting to be grabbed by one of the volunteer mechanics. The walls are lined with novelty posters and Polaroids of volunteers. File cabinets and boxes overflow with metal parts and rubber tubes, labeled with signs like “cotter cranks” and “tubes 2 B patched.” Piles of rusted metal sit on top of old rugs, cobbled together into something resembling a carpet to cover the wooden floor. From the pipes hang the warehouse’s permanent collection, novelty bikes and beautiful specimens that they will never give away.
General manager Nick Colombo’s job is to oversee the volunteer staff, so he mostly works with mechanics. He explains that they start by taking apart a junk bike so they can see how everything fits together. After a few weeks of that, it’s on to the logical next step: putting the bikes back together. From then on, volunteers can come in, pick out a bike and make all the necessary repairs.
The WBC even educates mechanics outside of their walls. They’ve started bike education classes in Racine, Wisc., and are planning to start a bike repair university in Angola. “We’re trying to get kids interested in bike mechanics from a young age,” Ravenscroft says.
Before they are repaired, the bikes are housed next to the mechanics’ room in an enormous, unheated storage room that Ravenscroft jokingly describes as “climate controlled.” Amidst the piles of rubble and cobwebs are rows of bikes, some without wheels, some covered in dust, some looking good enough to ride. The bikes have come from a variety of sources, from private donations to bike drives to police donations of unclaimed stolen bikes. Ravenscroft, standing by the window where they used to lower the bikes down to a truck with a makeshift pulley system, estimates that there are only 200 bikes in the room now. “We can hold as many as 2,000 bikes in here,” he says, his voice echoing in the vast room as if to underscore how empty it is. Even when the room is full, that’s less than half of their stock for a year.
TO GUERRA FREITAS, the bike is a way to rebuild a community. As the executive director of the Evanston-based SHARECircle, Freitas has worked with WBC to send more than 1,000 bikes to Angola. His eyes light up when he talks about the good the bikes are doing there, and he starts talking so fast it’s difficult to make out the words through his African accent.
“You can get to work and school faster. But you don’t just get there faster, you get there with more energy,” he says, waving his arms. “And nurses and teachers can get to their places of work faster. The benefits trickle down. And a woman will carry more cargo to the market and get there faster. It helps her with her small business. The bike doesn’t just benefit one person, but the whole community.”
Freitas, a short Angolan native who never seems to stop smiling, was first introduced to Ravenscroft after they were interviewed on Chicago Public Radio in 2005. Freitas had already been working for seven years to send aid to Angola, shipping medical and school supplies to rebuild the nation that had been ravaged by civil war. Working with SHARECircle soon became one of the WBC’s most successful partnerships. The cooperative provides the bikes and the shipping funds, while SHARECircle takes care of the distribution on the ground.
The WBC sends out about 12 shipments every year, each holding up to 450 bikes if they’re packaged right. Their shipments go all over the world, even places supposedly off limits.
“To my knowledge, we’re the only people shipping bikes to Cuba,” Ravenscroft says.
Once they arrive, other organizations handle the distribution. “We have a network on the ground that meets with community leaders and selects the target group for bike distribution,” Freitas says. “It’s not possible to attend to everyone, so we end up having to choose the neediest of the neediest.”
But is a bike what the people need? Wouldn’t Freitas be better off sending food or building houses? He says he’s not just trying to help the community, but build it up.
“What’s the proverb?” Freitas says. “Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, he’ll eat for life,” he says, pausing dramatically at the end. For him, the best way to help Angola is to foster schools and health care. And the best way to do that is to get teachers, students and nurses to work and school on time and with energy.
The WBC also donates about 500 bikes to local charities every year. Jenny Mack is the manager of refugee youth and family services at Heartland Alliance, a Chicago group that helps refugees. They partnered with WBC in 2006 to have a bike distribution and safety fair for refugee families, where they got bikes, locks and helmets. Mack said the fair was a success and helped the refugee families tremendously.
“With a bike, they are able to travel somewhere and not pay $2 either way,” she says. “It relieves stress and affords them independence. Plus, for the kids, it was good old-fashioned fun.”
Some might still dismiss the bike as something that won’t really help, but photos of one of Freitas’ distributions suggests otherwise. There’s a boy sitting on his new bike, beaming as he grips the handlebars. Others look on, some smiling, some clearly jealous, some clamoring just to reach out and touch it. There’s a man dressed in a bright blue suit, one he must reserve for only the most important occasions: giving out mountain bikes. A crowd has gathered and lined up, practically forming a parade route for the lucky recipients of the used bikes. To them, the bike is the best thing that’s happened in a long time.
TO JON DERVITER, the bike is $80. He’s working in the WBC storefront, where half of the repaired bikes go, where they get a price tag hung from their handlebars and a customer to ogle over and eventually buy them. This is where the WBC gets the money to do everything else.
The store is surprisingly small, packed wall-to-wall with bikes. Where there’s not a bike, there’s something else — a box of helmets, a porcelain statue of a bird, a file cabinet of spare parts. The storefront volunteers sit behind a desk that overlooks the whole store, getting up to change the CD or greet the customers that constantly stream in and out.
Some customers come in because they know their purchase will help a good cause. Most just know they can’t beat the prices.
The nicest bikes in the store — the ones with carbon frames and shock absorbers — are shown off in the window and carry price tags from $200 to $600. The more unusual bikes have much lower prices, like the red Schwinn Breeze that goes for $55, or the hot pink 3-speed with C*E*L*E*B*R*I*T*Y painted on the frame that costs a cool $40. Ravenscroft says their bikes go as low as one-third of the price they would fetch on eBay.
The competitive prices mean the store sells out almost every day. Any profit goes to a fund to buy a new warehouse, to provide lunch for the mechanics or to send some volunteers to their international sites.
“At this point, we’ve got more money than bikes,” Ravenscroft says.
Of course, the popularity means that more competitors want to hone in on their business. Ravenscroft notes that the market for used bikes has skyrocketed in the past few years and the aesthetic has changed so that retro junkers are now cool.
“Either we caused it or we happened to witness it,” he says, adding that flea markets and yard sales are elbowing in. “In a way, we’ve created our own demise.”
TO MAYA PEDAL, the bike is a way to power a house. Maya Pedal, a group based in Guatemala, is one of the WBC’s biggest partners and the inspiration for the latest project: pedal-powered machines. These machines harness the technology of the bike, hooking it up to electric generators or simple machines.
“One billion people in the world don’t have power,” Ravenscroft says. “But you can hook up the bike machine to a DC motor and power appliances that way. You can do so much more with your legs.”
Ravenscroft says the WBC first started experimenting with the bike machines a year and a half ago after seeing Maya Pedal use them in Guatemala. He says that people in other countries understand bikes, so it’s an easy way for them to generate power. Besides creating DC power, the bikes can also be transformed into simple machines like grain mills.
Volunteers meet on Wednesday nights to play around with the machines and build ones to be sent in the shipping containers. Beyond the charity, though, there’s a lot of fun that comes along with the machines. The WBC has experimented with running model trains and powering blenders to make smoothies, and Freitas even describes plans to hold a concert that used musical instruments powered by bikes.
Freitas also says he wants to build a bike-powered study center in Angola.
“Imagine lighting a study center with bikes and LED lights,” he says. “Some students would be reading, some pedaling, some surfing the net. Just imagine that!”
TO ANDREW FREEMAN, the bike is a way to live his life. Freeman, a storefront volunteer, could easily be mistaken for a customer that rode in off the street. He’s still wearing his windbreaker, his pants are rolled up around his ankles and his shoes with the pedal clamps make him click like a tap dancer every time he takes a step. He talks about how he’s always fixing his friends’ bikes. He looks over the products in the storefront like a museum curator examines a Picasso.
Freeman’s fascination with bikes is one the entire volunteer community feels. The bike unites this ragtag bunch. Fiser started volunteering so he could learn to do repairs by himself, Colombo wanted to replace his stolen bike, Freeman just kept coming in to do his own repairs. The common interest brings the volunteers close together, forming the atmosphere that everyone described as “friendly.”
But what’s amazing is how this obsession with bikes has become a force of good to help thousands of poor people.
For most people, the bike is something to ride for fun, a way to get to work without spending money on gas, a great way to exercise. It’s not a treasure; the bike can be replaced when the style changes.
“People treat their bikes like clothing,” Ravenscroft says. “You want a new look every so often. People just aren’t attached.”
But to the people in the WBC, the bike is a way of life. And for the people they help, it means so much more.
Freitas says it best. “Sometimes in the U.S., we take things for granted. For us, a bike is just a bike,” he says. “But in other places, a bike can change a life.”