The Hot Chocolate Ride, Giving Tuesday, and more!

Posted on December 1, 2020 by commonwheels| Comments Off on The Hot Chocolate Ride, Giving Tuesday, and more!
 

Stay Warm With Our Hot Chocolate Ride This Weekend

We are really excited to continue our food rides, and since the weather seems to be holding out we’re going out once more, this time in search of a nice cup of hot chocolate! Since there seems to be a touch of rain in the forecast, our rain date will be the following Saturday, December 12th. Join us on a nice casual ride around Boston and Cambridge as we support some local businesses, and explore some of the new cyclist-focused infrastructure that’s been deployed! Masks required, weather appropriate gear encouraged! Keep an eye on our social media later in the week for the latest updates

Giving Tuesday

Of course, we at CommonWheels also wanted to reach out to you fine folk on today’s Giving Tuesday to ask for your support in sustaining our organization. This year has been challenging for everybody, and somethign we are fiercely proud of is just how many smiles we’ve been able to put on people’s faces. We think they’re smiling at us at least, it’s hard to tell with all the masks. Operation #Wheels4Meals is still ongoing, and we’ve made over 800 deliveries from food pantries to our neighbors and we’re going to continue to do our best to help our community over the coming months.

For those of you who don’t know, CommonWheels was started eight years ago by people who just wanted to hand out bike lights to help keep their neighbors safe at night. That grew to dragging a shopping cart full of bike tools and plopping down in parks, hollering at passerby cyclists to come grease their chains. We were born from this radical “do it yourself” mentality, and we set out to empower the residents of Allston-Brighton with everything we knew about bikes, so they too could experience the unique joy a bike ride could bring.

Since then we’ve grown, and its been an incredible journey. Our Open Shops have popped up all across Allston and Brighton, our volunteers and staff have worked with many local schools to teach youths how to ride bikes, and we’ve been able to run “Earn A Bike” programs for all sorts of communities in our neighborhood. We’ve really enjoyed all these opportunities to not only teach these technical and social skills, but to create these wonderful spaces for members of our community to grow and engage with their peers.

We’ve been running a series of youth events this summer at the Charlesview we’ve been calling the “CommonWheels Skills Drill and Ice Cream Ride” where we laid out challenge courses for our kids to practice safe riding techniques, and then we took them on a wonderful ride across the footbridge to the bike path. One of the sweetest moments every time, however, has been seeing the older siblings, many of which who have participated in previous CommonWheels programming at the Charlesview, step in, and help their younger siblings repair their bikes using the skills we taught them.

e are asking for donations on this Giving Tuesday to help us run even more programs like the Ice Cream Ride in even more places. We are grateful for any support we are given, whether it’s $80 for a case of tubes to fix flats, $15 for a set of brake cabling, or even $5 to make sure our team stays caffeinated! Of course, if you are a member of a large organization, or would like to make a large we have a few tiers of donation available below!  We accept all donations through QGiv at this link

We thank you for supporting us during this wild and crazy year, whether it’s been visiting us at the Farmers Market Open Shop, coming on the Cannoli Run, or simply just donating and volunteering your time and money. We really appreciate each and every one of you and we are so excited to bring you a ton of wonderful programs in 2021. Stay tuned for our winter group ride schedule, and as always, 

See you on the streets!

Team CommonWheels

 
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