Brett Stepanik
Alex Lai, foreground, had little experience when she started working at Wheels for Winners.
People who have never repaired bicycles for people who need them doesn’t sound like an efficient operating model. Until, that is, you visit Wheels for Winners, a volunteer collective that provides bikes to youngsters who earn them by completing a minimum of 15 hours of community service. On a recent warm evening the overhead garage door at the workshop, 229 S. Fair Oaks Ave., is open to the late afternoon sun and a half dozen apprentice mechanics toil away inside, bringing donated, busted bicycles back from the dead.
The mechanics here are also driven by the mission of community service. Volunteers who have never so much as changed a flat are trained by experienced mechanics. No bike leaves the shop without an exhaustive, check-list inspection by a veteran. One of those veterans is Alan Crossley, a retired DNR biologist with a perpetual, cat-swallowed-the-canary smile.
A life-long bike enthusiast who celebrated his retirement by biking across the country, it’s clear, during a tour of the shop, that Crossley has found his two-wheeled nirvana. Up in the parts loft, we walk past rows of wheel hubs, buckets of handlebar stems, milk crates overflowing with center-pull brakes, and a mind-bending array of baskets and pails overflowing with uh, well, all kinds of metal things. Recycled parts headed for a second life on a recycled bike.
Crossley says the bursting inventory comes in handy. “If something is rusty, I just come up here to find the same part that’s not rusty,” he says. “The idea is to make it ride and look like something you’d be proud to ride around on.”
You could say pride is at the hub of Wheels for Winners. Any child would be happy to have a bike given to them. But there’s less pride of ownership that way. “It’s the old ‘skin in the game’ approach,” says Crossley.
Tonight’s workforce is another layer of the “skin in the game” model: volunteers who are interested in giving back but who also want to learn how to fix a bike. Wheels is one of the most popular destinations among UW-Madison students enrolled in the Badger Volunteers program. UW grad student Alex Lai will end 12 semesters of service here this summer when she completes her doctorate in environmental chemistry and heads to the west coast.
“Four students can be placed here per semester,” Lai says. “This program fills up almost instantly.”
While we talk Lai is disassembling a rear wheel, extracting the free wheel and inspecting the bearings. When she started, she had virtually no mechanical knowledge and was intimidated by what she perceived to be Madison’s macho bike culture. Not here, she says, describing an environment so accepting that she remembers feeling fine asking in her first week: “Talk about the thing that spins.”
Ordinary Madisonians volunteer, too, like Short Stack Eatery co-owner Alex Lindenmeyer, who began volunteering two years ago. For her the Wheels mission is an extension of her diner’s commitment to social justice hiring practices and overall sustainability goals.
On the other side of the wrench is the rider: young people (and an occasional adult) who can’t afford to buy a bike but who volunteer around town in order to earn one. Crossley mentions Haddy and her brother Modou as examples, siblings who earned their bikes by writing for the Simpson Street Free Press. A group of students at Leopold Elementary earned their bikes in an afterschool program where they were given cameras and asked to photograph things that pointed to positive and negative elements of bike and pedestrian safety. They presented a PowerPoint of the project upon completion.
With virtually no promotion the 27-year-old Wheels for Winners program receives about 350 donated bikes each year. Crossley says a greater need is for word to get out to young people that they have the opportunity to earn a bike. It’s a ride that might roll them into a life-long interest in community service.
Bikes earned by young riders in 2017: 144
Hours of community service provided by bike earners in 2017: 4,760
Hours worked by volunteer bike mechanics in 2017: 2,500
15 minutes: Time it took Crossley to change a flat before learning mechanics at Wheels.
5 minutes: Time it takes Crossley to change a flat now.
