Commonwheels Bicycle Co-Op

It’s Bike Week!  We’ve got a TON of stuff on the calendar:

Saturday May 12th: Allston Village Farmer’s Market, 11am – 3pm, it’s Allston’s first farmer’s market of the season, on the corner of Brighton Ave and Cambridge St (Union Sq in Allston, right outside Jackson Mann Community Center).  Come by to grab some fresh produce — and CW will be there with tools and stands and free helmets for folks in the community!

Sunday May 13th: The Christina Clarke Genco Memorial Ride , 8am to 3pm, a fantastic ride around Newtown. Funds raised on this ride will benefit Habitat for Humanity and and Bike & Build.

Monday May 14th: Rush Hour Race!  7:45am to 10am.  What’s the fastest way to get from Davis Square to Kendall Square? Join local celebrities as they “race to work” using three modes of transportation (bike, car, and the T).  Hosted by LivableStreets and Somerville and Cambridge Bicycle Committees

Wednesday May 15th: CW Open Shop,  5:30pm until dusk, on the corner of Union Sq in Allston (in case of rain event will be TBD).  We’ll be there with stands, tools, and know-how to help you get your wheels rolling!

Thursday May 17th: Bike and Bowl! 6pm – 8pm, until 11pm. CW is leading a ride around the city out to Castle Island and ending up at Kings Bowling Alley in the Back Bay. We’re meeting at Copley Sq at 6 (leaving at 6:30), riding along the river, harbor, and through the South End before making it to Kings at 8pm for bowling and beverages.  Plus there’s Karaoke!

Friday May 18th: Bike Friday at City Hall Plaza, 7am -10am, join your fellow local bike commuters as they ride from destinations all around the region converging at Boston’s City Hall for free breakfast and tons of smiles.

Sunday May 20th: Allston/Brighton’s D-14 Child Safety Day, 10am – 2pm, at 301 Washington Street.  It’ll be featuring a CW-hosted Bike Rodeo and Obstacle Course, with free helmets and a few kids bikes to give away, and free ice cream and hot dogs  and a moon bounce and tons of prizes!  Bring your kid, or your inner-kid, out to a great day in Allston.

 

SO MUCH BIKES!  These are great opportunities to get out and ride with others. In our opinion, there’s nothing quite as fun as a good group ride.

and of course every week is bike week for CommonWheels, so keep up with us and we hope to see you at all our happenings all season long.

-CW

 

We wanted to spread the word about this great ride for a great cause! please consider joining CW and the hundreds of other riders on mother’s day for the Christina Clarke Genco Foundation ride.

here’s a bit of info: ”The mission of the Christina Clarke Genco Foundation is to inspire youth to find their passion and make a difference in their communities. We seek to encourage youth to channel their energies towards the development of skills and personal qualities that will enhance their life and the well being of their family and communities. We believe in empowering youth to find their passion through athletic activities, community service, and pedal power.

Christina was on her second service trip with Bike & Build, a non-profit group dedicated to cross-country bicycle trips to benefit affordable housing when a tragic accident took her life at the age of 22. Christina’s short journey through life was driven by her passion for helping others.  She was an inspiration to hundreds of youth, nurturing, mentoring, and coaching them. She will always be remembered for her gentle spirit, athleticism, creativity, and commitment to making a difference in the world at such a young age.

The Foundation was created to continue Christina’s legacy.”

you can check out more info here: https://www.facebook.com/ccgfoundation

and at: http://ccgfoundation.org/

and read a bit about Christina’s personal bicycle connections in Boston, on Bike and Build, and at BU on The Humble Cyclist’s great post.

If you can’t join the ride, please consider donating to the cause.

Sincerely, in memory and solidarity,

CW

 

April 29, 2012
8:00 pm	to	11:00 pm

Hey CW,

In case you haven’t heard, this Sunday night is the 2012 Midnight Marathon Bike Ride, but before you head out on a 26.2 mile ride you should stop by CW in the afternoon to tune up your ride. You’re going to want working brakes, inflated tires, and tight cables, so starting in the afternoon we’ll have all our tools and stands on hand at the Penniman Park in Allston (right near our old space on Rugg Rd).  You can stop by and do some free maintenance, using our brand new set of tools!  Sunday, from 2pm until dark.

If you’re planning on coming by, shoot us a line at tools@commonwheels.org so we’ll expect you, and to be able to provide you with directions and more info.

You can look up details on the Midnight Marathon Bike Ride here:  http://www.facebook.com/events/213169195450849

and sponsored by Boston Socieites of Spontaneity:  http://www.bostonsos.org/adventure/boston-midnight-marathon/114-boston-midnight-marathon-ride-details-2.html

Great! We hope to see you before the ride to make sure your ride is equiped for the long haul.  And we’ll be organizing a ride from Allston to S. Station around 9:30pm to make sure we have a spot on the MBTA train, leaving from Union Sq in Allston (right outside Jackson Mann Community Center).

(and honestly, this is one of the best rides of the year.  Last year we packed over 200 bikes on the commuter rail out to Hopkington!)

Ride Easy,

CW

CommonWheels is rolling out the bike stands and taking over the streets of Allston Village!

On April 1st (appropriately), CommonWheels is setting up shop right in the heart of Allston, literally at the corner of Harvard and Brighton — We’ve graciously asked the City of Boston to lend us a few of their precious onstreet parking spaces so that we can offer our fine services to the folks in Allston. Just for the day, we are taking over parking spots and replacing them with bike stands, tools, tables, chairs, a few potted plants, some board games, and perhaps a few April Fools jokes.

Starting at noon, we will be offering do-it-yourself bike repair, with a few Fix-A-Flat and Wipe-And-Lube workshops throughout the day. So you can even show up and learn a thing or two about keepin’ that chain lubed and changing that stubborn flat tire! How’s that for “better than a parked car”??

The point is, basically, to show what we can do with a few parking spaces if given the chance. If you haven’t heard of Park(ing) Day before, check out some images of what folks around the world have done: http://tinyurl.com/7mb5a2h
Typically, Park(ing) Day takes place in September every year, but we thought we’d jump the gun, and what better day than April 1st?!

So stop by, hang out for a bit, and give your bike a quick tune up, fools.

Happy Biking,
CW

Come out and enjoy a fun group ride to Drumlin Farm — We’re going to check out a bunch of little baby sheep and see their moms get sheared at the WOOLAPALOOZA festival!

Woolapalooza: “It’s a sure sign of spring—time to shear the sheep! Come join the fun on March 31, 2012, from 10am to 4pm, at Woolapalooza. Bask in the beauty of Mass Audubon’s Drumlin Farm, the perfect setting to delight in all things sheep. Festival highlights include Drumlin Farm’s new spring babies, sheep shearing and sheepherding demonstrations, hands-on activities for all ages, and all natural, locally grown and harvested Drumlin Farm food. Local fiber artisans will offer demonstrations and sell their handmade products. Follow the “Sheep-to-Sweater Interpretive Trail” to learn how fleece on a sheep becomes the warm woolen sweater you wear.”

That sounds AWESOME! herding demos, “new spring babies”, wool artisans and farm fresh food!
here’s their site: http://tinyurl.com/d6suw9

And, even better, if you ride with us you can get the member rate for the day, at $9, saving just about 20% on the entrance fee — CommonWheels is signing up by the end of this week, so please let us know asap and we’ll put you on the list.
and of course traveling to the farm is FREE since we’re BIKING!

We’ll be meeting up around 11 am from Union Sq in Allston, right outside the Jackson Mann Center, and leaving promptly at 11:30ish.
Show up early to go over your bike for a quick tune-up. we’ll have the CommonWheels tools with us
(the ride goes a bit more than 10 miles each way, 1.5 hours of riding)

TO GET THERE
here’s a map of Union Sq in Allston:http://g.co/maps/d2ryc
here’s a map of Drumlin Farm: http://tinyurl.com/7o5vono

It’ll be a light and slow easy ride, following along the Charles River most of the way
we’ll have a ride map up shortly showing the exact route

this is our first ride for the CommonWheels season.
**our next ride is April 9th — to Lanes & Games in Arlington for candlepin bowling.** keep an eye out for all sorts of fun trips and events all season.
your bike looks fun, are you into group rides?

Ride Good,
CW

Hello CommonWheelers,

As we mentioned in our last entry, winter is fading away and we’re all chomping at the bit to begin an awesome season in less than a month.  But, before we hit the ground running pedaling, we want to hear your thoughts on the programs we’ll be offering this year.  Please allow us to present our 2012 user survey.

The survey won’t take more than 5 minutes of your time, and your answers will help us figure out how best to get as many folks as possible out and riding the streets of Boston safely.  We want to hear from you whether you were at every event last year, or never even made it down to Rugg Road (even though you really meant to).  And please, feel free to share this survey far and wide!  The URL is: http://bit.ly/CW2012Survey

Thanks for helping us out – we’ll see you soon,

CommonWheels

Hey Hey, an Update!

After a lovely off-season of mild winter weather, world travel, and many side projects, CommonWheels is now up and moving again, and are looking to gear up and hit the ground spinning come the first of April!

Changing our operations from last year, we are planning on a programs-based season; meaning we’ll have workshops twice a month, rides once a month, monthly youth programs and bike giveaways, and of course weekly CommonTools.  Yet as our grungy artsy space at Rugg Road is awaiting the reckoning of a wrecking ball, we are going to be bringing the tools and programs out into the neighborhood!  We have yet to iron out all the locations (looking into city parks and community centers, bike shops, and friendly cafe) and dates/times, but keep an eye to the blog for updates.  Coming soon: a calendar!  Possibly compatible with your google!

Also, we were pleased to partake in the 4th annual Boston Bikes Update, with so many fellow organizations that are working hard to make a better bicycling environment in our fair city.  If you missed the event, a great write up was provided by The Humble Cyclist .  The jist is, the City has done a lot last year, with a lot of help.  And we’re going to do so much more this year, with even more help!

At CommonWheels we do promise much more content and events in the weeks to come, but know we are still out there riding strong, and we want you to be there riding with us.

Sincerely,

Your Friendly Bicycle Collective, CommonWheels

Commonwheels Bicycle Co-Op will be moving our operations away from Rugg Road and reorganizing over the next few months — call it an “off” season.

Since the deal was made to take a wrecking ball to our humble space, we at Commonwheels have been rethinking our programming, our tool access, and our overall goals as a community resource.  After paring down our Tuesday Open Shops and bike donations over the course of December, we are now looking to simultaneously mobilize and hunker down while the thermostat dips lower and lower.  The long and short is: we need to move all our bikes and parts, and we need to plan out our programs for the Biking Year 2012.  So we’ll be taking the next few months to relocate physically, and to become more involved in community events and community centers around the city where we can host events come springtime.  Once the weather loosens its icy grip on all that is good and green and alive in this fair city, we shall be ready to reopen our tool times, group rides, classes and workshops, and generally awesome activities.  Call it: “In anticipation of Spring.”

But we did have an amazing 2011.  By following a course of “come what may,” Commonwheels started as a concept — with a bunch of scrappy bike advocates who simply wanted to do “more.”  And by giving the newly dubbed Commonwheelers a few resources (a wrench and some lube, a place to set up a portable stand next to the BBQ, a connection or two in Boston’s bike scene, a social web to attract riders) “more” turned out to be a lot: weekly open shops that spilled out into the parking lot, monthly rides to swimming holes all around the Hub, farmers markets with fresh veggies and tune-ups, bike donations at local health clinics, alley cat after parties, music shows and Pee Wee Herman movies and bike-powered smoothies.  The list goes on.  And will continue to go on, as we gear up for Biking Season 2012.  It’s all about cadence. (And balance.)

We couldn’t have done any of this without the interest, support, and enthusiasm of our community — including our business partners and raffle supporters, but more so from the people who got involved on a personal level.  We mingled and mixed a wide range of bikers this past season, from all sorts of places.  We were amazed at the variety and diversity of ages, genders, ethnicities, economic and employment backgrounds, relations everyone had with their ride and their neighborhood and their city.  It was apparent based simply on what bikes people rode over.  Everyone who came and participated brought something to Commonwheels (besides a bike that needed some loving), something only they could have had, and shared it with the rest of the community, and the mix that brewed was something truly special.  And for that, we thank you all!

And thanks for all the Fun!  For all the reasons that we ride (it’s quick, cheap, green, fit, energizing, independent, easy, relaxing, sexy…) the number one always seems to be “Because it’s FUN!”  We love how that comes back to us, again and again.  And by bringing everyone together at Commonwheels, we simply had a blast this year.

So look for us to keep momentum going when we roll out again in the Spring, when we’ll have a new location, a new calendar, new tools, new rides, and an expanded batch of CWers.

From all of us and for all of you, a special thanks from Commonwheels.

-CW

Last week, in an effort to get some young new riders out in the world, Commonwheels teamed up with the City of Boston’s Roll it Forward program and Joseph M Smith Community Health Clinic to help find homes for 15 bikes. Check out the photos of the happy recipients!

Boston Bikes and Commonwheels received the used  bikes through donations, and even got some new bikes from International Bicycle Center , which is how we were able to give them away for free to the families.  Working through local networks, Commonwheels, the health center, and the Jackson Mann Community Center, we organized with the parents to gather all the kids together, give them (and their parents) a thorough “helmet review” and “here’s how your brakes work” talk, and send them home with newly tuned up used bikes.  We didn’t have time to wrap the bikes in gift wrap or dress up like Santa, but the spirit was the same none the less.

If you’d like to help facilitate this kind of bikes donation in the future, we encourage you to check out the Roll it Forward Program (http://rollitforward.blogspot.com/) where you can find out how to donate bikes.  And if you know of any kids who may need a bike, Commonwheels is looking to do another round of bike drop in the Spring.  Please email galen@commonwheels.org for more info.

-CW