Their chains may no longer be taut and shiny, their pedals may be loose or their tires flat, but thousands of bikes parked in rows or piled in stacks in an unmarked warehouse in Chicago’s Tri-Taylor neighborhood are being sorted and prepared for renewed use on nearby streets and in faraway places.
Rescued from dumpsters, alleys and garages, these bikes no longer occupy space in basements or garages where they once seemed to mock the abandoned plans by their former owners to get more fit through cycling. And they are not clogging landfills.
From the point of view of Lee Ravenscroft and other volunteers working for The Working Bikes Cooperative, these neglected bikes have a great deal more potential than merely as scrap metal or providing material for garage sales. With the turn of a wrench or the replacement of a tire, they can be returned to functionality and much more.
The Chicago-based organization sees these discarded and donated bikes as tools that can significantly improve the lives and opportunities of people in less developed countries.
The cooperative is working toward providing second lives for many of these bikes in places where they are badly needed. Some will be shipped to developing countries where they will provide people in rural villages with transportation to and from work, with a way to get products to market, to connect with neighboring villages and as a means of improving health, re-creating and socializing.
Other bikes will stay in Chicago where people who need an inexpensive, working bike can pick one up for $35 to $65.
Four hundred bikes and an assortment of parts and tools were shipped recently to Ghana, where there is a list of about 3,000 people waiting to get a bicycle.
Those who receive bikes pay about $3 a month for 12 months to purchase them, said Dr. Osei Darkwa of the Asante Akim Multipurpose Community Telecentre in Accra, Ghana. The center will distribute the bikes bound for a smaller village, Patriensa.
“Incomes are very low in Ghana,” said Darkwa. “People can’t afford to pay for bikes outright. But there’s an overwhelming demand for them.”
“When you’re only making about $50 a month, you’re not going to a get a car. Your dream is to get a bicycle,” said Ravenscroft.
The telecenter’s goal, according to its founder, Darkwa, is to accelerate socio-economic development and education through technology and other social programs. In addition to offering computer training, the center has partnered with the Working Bikes Cooperative to provide people with bikes.
Darkwa discovered the cooperative because of Chicago’s sister city relationship with Accra. About 1,500 bicycles have been distributed to people in Ghana through the center. Some were from the cooperative; others came from other organizations in other cities that donate bikes.
According to Ravenscroft, the cooperative is the only organization in the area that is shipping discarded or donated bikes to developing countries. He started the cooperative in 1999.
Previously, Ravenscroft, 52, a retired electrical engineer who lives in Oak Park, had been collecting sewing machines and other useable items that were shipped to Nicaragua.
However, “I diversified into bicycles because I never saw a bike sitting idle [in a developing country],” he said. Ravenscroft has traveled extensively to such countries.
And bikes standing idle in the Chicago area? Of course, it seemed to Ravenscroft and nearly anyone else with a basement, garage, alley and eyes that these spaces, along with dumpsters, and junk yards would be an ample source of bicycles that are no longer used or wanted.
Brandon Zagorski, a volunteer, said it’s easy to collect about 80 bikes a day just by visiting a recycling center where people who scavenge for scrap metal are eager to sell them. The cooperative pays up to $5 per bike compared to about 50 cents that a recycling center offers, he said. The cooperative also seeks donations from individuals and from groups such as the Evanston Bike Club and students at Whitney Young High School who made a donation after holding a bike drive last spring.
Like Zagorski, many of the volunteers are avid cyclists who can identify bikes that would be easy to fix and others that could be stripped for useable parts.
“We’re cyclists so we know what can be repaired and what can’t in a minute,” Zagorski said.
“We can take three bikes and make one good one,” added Ravenscroft.
The cooperative has about 100 volunteers; 20 of whom are regulars. Founder Ravenscroft puts the emphasis on the group.
“We want it to be sort of an egalitarian experience where the focus is not on the individual. It’s a group experience,” said Zagorski.
In the last two years, Zagorski said the cooperative has shipped about 2,500 bicycles overseas. Though it has sent bicycles to Central America, Ravenscroft said they recently have been focusing on Africa because import duties are not as high as those in Central American countries.
The cooperative pays for shipping costs to Ghana; the telecenter pays for in-country shipping costs.
On a recent Saturday, a handful of volunteers gathered in the warehouse above an auto repair and muffler shop on Western Avenue. Their hands darkened by grease, some workers cannibalized bikes for parts and others greased chains, changed tires and worked on bikes to restore them to working order.
Jenny McBride, a volunteer from Villa Park, negotiated narrow paths between the rows and piles of bikes to find ones that would be suitable to send to Ghana. Those bikes had their front wheels and pedals removed to make it easier to pack them in shipping containers.
Once they arrive, the bikes sent to Ghana may require more attention to get them working. The telecenter offers classes on bicycle maintenance so the people who get the bikes can fix and maintain them.
Surveying the warehouse in Chicago, McBride, who has been a volunteer since July, said she was overwhelmed when she first saw the number of bikes there. Now, however, she said, she understands the system for how the bikes are organized.
“It’s looking more orderly to me so it must be beginning to make sense to me,” she said with a grin as she tied a front wheel to the frame.
McBride, 41, was looking for mountain bikes that would be well-suited to some of the unpaved roads and terrain in Ghana.
She also was keeping an eye out for children’s bikes.
Volunteering for the cooperative is ideal, she said. She has never owned a car and usually cycles to her job as a research assistant at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle.
When she heard about the cooperative at a cycling rally, McBride said she was so impressed with its mission and decided, “OK. Now I know where I’m going to spend my Saturdays.”
It would be hard for a volunteer or anyone else stepping in the warehouse not to be impressed by the waste that could have resulted had these bikes not been saved.
Being involved in the cooperative, McBride said, “helps us look at how we can export helpful things. We take it for granted that these things are available to us, but what about in Ghana or Kenya?”
Matt Frank, a student at the University of Chicago, climbed the stairs to the warehouse recently to buy a bike. Though the demand may not be quite as high as in Ghana, Ravenscroft said there are plenty of people in the Chicago area who depend on bikes for their transportation and cannot afford the hundreds a new one costs.
Frank, who lives in Hyde Park, said he rides his bike “because it’s better for the environment. It’s more fun and faster. I feel silly when I drive my car because everything I need is so close.”
Though he had come as a shopper, Frank stayed and helped the volunteers fixing the bikes. He said he likes the idea of riding bikes as a way to protect the environment and to help people in less-developed counties.
“Anything that has to do with [promoting] bikes is a good cause,” he said.
The bikes destined to stay in Chicago are restored to working order and sold via the warehouse or at large sales. The money generated by these sales goes to pay for the cooperative’s cost of shipping bikes abroad.
Many of the bikes that have been shipped to Ghana have been sold to teachers to get to their schools.
Other recipients are farmers.
The bikes have an effect on the local economy because farmers and others trying to make a living are able to reach markets they could not easily access by walking, said Darkwa.
Whether the farmers are selling plantains or yams, “they can put their wares in their bikes and get to markets in neighboring towns. It [the bikes] increase economic activity,” he said.
Bicycles are even changing social norms. Darkwa said that men have traditionally been the people who had access to bikes in Ghana. The telecenter also distributes to women and has formed an all-female cycling club. The tradition in Ghana is for women to carry goods on their heads. With bikes, it’s easier for them also to get items to market.
“It [a bike] frees women up so they can go out and improve their own economic standing,” he said. “And when they see other women riding, it’s empowering.”
Darkwa estimated it would take a least of year of shipments from the cooperative and other sources to get a bike into the hands of every person on his list. The supply of bikes in the U.S. and elsewhere is there; it’s the cost of shipping them that is most difficult for the telecenter.
Reaching the 3,000th person on Darkwa’s list would hardly be the end of the demand as the list of people who want bicycles “keeps growing,” Darkwa said.
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Information on The Working Bikes Cooperative is available at www.workingbikes.org or 708-660-9452.
