Volunteer Highlight: Holiday Bike Build

​Each year folks gives us hundreds of bikes. Truly, our last count was at about 340. That's nearly one bike per day! We often find ourselves having too many of one type of bike. One summer we had a ton of tall road bikes and barely any 24" mountain bikes for kids. It turns out we are quite dependent on folks donating a variety of bikes throughout the year. This year we found that we had about ten too many tiny bikes (bikes with a wheel size of 16" or less). So we got to work!

Before we took a little break for the holidays, we hosted one special volunteer event at our workshop: The Holiday Bike Build. We picked out eight of our best tiny bikes and called up our friends at Pre-k International (a free, high quality preschool program down the road from us) to make sure they had eight kiddos who could use a bike for the holidays. We checked in with some of our regular volunteers and asked them to join us for an evening of fixing! Dozens of new tires, tubes, baskets, bells, and a couple chains later we had eight solid bikes ready to be dropped off the next morning. We are truly grateful for the volunteers who gave their time to make these bikes ready, safe, and like-new for our little friends! Finally, thank you to the bicycle donors each year who give bikes a new life at Open Roads. We do our best to find creative and useful ways for them to help us meet our goals and fulfill our mission each year. Thank You!

Interested in volunteering with us? We now offer monthly opportunities to do just that! Second Tuesdays are monthly volunteer sessions that run from 4-7pm and take place at our workshop on Riverview Drive. This is a great time for folks to put their skills and generosity to use by helping us complete some projects! We will have a variety of projects available for different skills and interests each month. Learn more about our January event (happening in just a few days) here. You can also take a look at our Facebook event with the schedule for the next five months here.

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