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Newsletter - June 2007 Dear supporters of Yellow Bike, This is a great way to learn bike repair and maintenance from volunteer mechanics and build your own free bike in the process. During your time at the shop, experienced shop coordinators will guide you through bike repair projects. No bike repair experience is necessary. After 12 hours of volunteering (the equivalent of only three full workshops), you will be able to confidently start work on your own bike. Simply stop by during any of our open hours and talk to a Coordinator to get started building the bike of your dreams. View our Bikes Page and Services Page for more information on other ways to get experience working on bikes. YBP SURVEY - We've recently been thinking of ways to gauge what kind of impact the Yellow Bike Project has on the cycling community in a city like Austin. We hope that our free bike repair workshops empower people, like few other education efforts can, to depend on their bikes for transportation. Still, we're always interested in getting feedback on our effectiveness as an organization and new ideas on how to better realize our vision.To test test our intuition and gain a greater understanding of our organization, we have created an online survey . This survey is intended for anyone who has been involved with YBP through volunteering, fixing a bicycle, or learning about bikes. Your participation is greatly appreciated, as it helps us continue to evaluate our value to the community. Click here to take the survey now! KILL-A-WATT CHALLENGE - The Austin Chronicle and Austin Energy are hosting a contest to see who can reduce their energy bills the most this summer. Renters will compete against renters, homeowners against homeowners, businesses against businesses, and neighborhoods against neighborhoods to win prizes all summer long (view list of prize contributors ). Many of us tend to think of our driving habits when we think of our contribution to global warming, but in fact it's our electricity habit that accounts for 39% of our carbon-dioxide emissions, while transportation accounts for just 33%. While we can't help you win this summer by helping you get on a bike, we encourage you to sign-up to see how much of a difference you can make off the road. Visit the Chronicle's Kill-a-watt Challenge page for details and sign-up . Yellow Bike is supporting the contest with monthly prizes in the Neighborhood category. For the winners in the Neighborhood category for June, July, August and September, we will be hosting a private shop where residents of the neighborhood can come as a group to use the shop. They will have access to all of our shop services, tools and expertise to get their personal bikes repaired and ready for use this summer. TOOL AND PARTS DONATION TO START-UP COMMUNITY BIKE SHOP - A few months ago we made a tool and parts donation to the "Back in the Saddle Bike Collective," a start-up community bike project in Little Rock, Arkansas. One of the founders is a past volunteer with Yellow Bike and approached us for help in starting a community bike shop. They have started repairing the bikes that we donated to them as sale bikes. With the sale bike proceeds they are looking to buy more tools to fill out their shop and expand their bike donations to the community. They are working with Food Not Bombs to give away 15 bikes to the homeless by the end of the month.Last year we made similar donations to two start-up shops: the Waco Volunteer Bike Center in Waco, TX and to Denton Green Bikes in Denton, Texas. We are excited about the emergence of new groups around the country with similar missions as ours. SCHEDULE - Here is our schedule. Summer hours are reduced on account of coordinators out on vacation. Help us expand shop hours by volunteering to become a shop coordinator.
** Collective Meetings: Shop "closed" for collective meeting at our Main Shop (51st Street) on the 1st Tuesday of the month. Meeting begins at 7:30 pm. Open to the public. If you would like to contribute ideas to the collective, make requests, learn more about the project and its internal workings, or just get more involved this is the forum for you. *** Volunteers Needed: We need volunteers so that we can expand and maintain hours of our shops. We want to be open more often. Come to the main 51st street shop to learn how you can help. CAN YOU HELP YELLOW BIKE? CALL FOR VOLUNTEER COORDINATORS! - If you have been wanting to help out Yellow Bike by volunteering as a shop coordinator, we think now is the time to try it out! Several of our coordinators are out of town this summer forcing us to reduce the number of shops we host a week. If you can get involved only for a month or two before you start back in school or go on a big vacation we would still love the help. There is no need to be an expert mechanic to start helping as an apprentice shop coordinator. We pair all of our coordinators in training with two experienced coordinators at each shop. Answering the questions of shop users is the fastest way to learn bike repair. It will reinforce the knowledge you have and expose you to new problems that experienced coordinators will guide you through. To get started, visit our collective meeting to introduce yourself and arrange the start of your apprenticeship. Collective meetings are on the first Tuesday of the month at 7:30 pm at our 51st Street Shop (the next meeting is on July 3rd). You can also stop by the shop anytime we're open and talk to the coordinators about the experience of being a shop coordinator. Tell them your intention and they can get you started on your way to serving the Yellow Bike community in this special way. KNOW YOUR CITY'S BICYCLE PLAN - We started reading through Austin's Bicycle Plan and found some interesting stuff. We thought that we would share a bit of it with you. The Austin Bicycle Plan is located online on the City's Bicycle and Pedestrian Program's website. The following chart compares the Full costs of commuting by transportation mode. The Full Cost of commuting includes the Direct Costs, paid directly by the user in a market situation, and Indirect Costs, not paid directly by the user, but by society as a whole (ie. infrastructure construction, effects of pollution, time lost to congestion, etc.). The total cost of commuting by bike is less than 10 times the cost of commuting by Automobile!
FIVE KIDS BIKES DONATED FOR FDIC RAFFLE - We donated 5 bikes to a FDIC Family Resource Fair. The bikes were raffled to kids from low to moderate income families who attended the event. The presenters wanted to make the event kid friendly to encourage greater participation and attendance to their event. Bikes were given away with light-sets and locks. |
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