United We (Kick)Stand
This article first appeared in the May/June 2023 issue of Adventure Cyclist magazine.
Twenty-three blocks due south of Temple Square, in an industrial part of town that nonetheless enjoys a couple of excellent breweries, sits the Bicycle Collective, Salt Lake City, Utah’s nonprofit community bike shop. There are a few bike racks on the sidewalk outside, and greeting you with a wave at the front door is a statue of a person made of old bicycle parts attached to a defunct mailbox. Inside, you won’t find a spotless shop floor or a neat array of brand-new carbon racing bikes that cost more than a year’s rent. Instead, you’ll see racks of restored bikes for sale — priced mostly at a few hundred dollars or less — alongside a handful of well-used workstations, bins of old derailers and brake calipers, and a pile of worn tires bound for recycling, all sitting beneath rows of wheels hanging from the ceiling like chandeliers.
On the radio: Cat Stevens. On the wall above the entrance: a Klein road bike, an old Peugeot, and a vintage Slingshot mountain bike bejeweled with purple anodized components. In the bike racks: a collection of ’90s mountain bikes, well-used hybrids, old road bikes, and even a mint Co-Motion Siskiyou with a Pinion gearbox. At the work benches — each one with its own set of tools, a bike stand, a wheel truing stand, and, for some reason, a bottle of Windex — were a few volunteers wrenching on kids’ bikes. In the back were stacks of bikes in various states of disrepair. Like any good shop, it smelled strongly of grease and old rubber. Also like any good shop, there was a happy shop dog named Abby who came to greet me.
The Salt Lake City Bicycle Collective was founded in 2002 by, according to Executive Director Donna McAleer, “a group of five cycling enthusiasts who were rescuing bikes out of dumpsters.” She admitted that this story might be lore. “It operated out of somebody’s garage for a while, then got to its first retail location and started this kind of do-it-yourself model but was a little bit of a club aspect that focused on those who are cycling enthusiasts.”
Like a lot of nonprofits, the Bicycle Collective went through some tumultuous times. “There’s been some really, really lean years, and years when the organization didn’t know if they were going to be able to make payroll or not, which obviously is tough for any employee to live under,” said McAleer. “In 2019, when I was hired, one of the things that I was charged with was looking at how do we improve our employee retention and become a unified organization.”
Now, the Bicycle Collective has both part-time and full-time salaried employees, with the latter enjoying paid healthcare, paid time off, and sick leave. Over the years, the Collective has taken three other locations under its wing. Community bike shops had sprung up independently in Provo, Ogden, and St. George, and they’re all now under the Bicycle Collective’s umbrella. Each location employs its own offering of services based on the needs of their specific communities. For the Salt Lake City location — which is also the nonprofit’s headquarters — it’s all about providing a utility to underserved populations.
“The Bike Collective is a small, homegrown organization that filled a gap of great need in Utah,” said Sean Murphy, who has served as board chair since 2016. The “gap” Murphy mentioned refers to the people on bikes who might not consider themselves “cyclists” and who might be intimidated by or just simply cannot afford the products sold at most bike shops — the underemployed, the unemployed, people who lack stable housing, the formerly incarcerated, refugees, kids. There are a lot of people in Salt Lake City who get to where they’re going by bicycle not by choice or because it’s fun and good exercise, but because the bicycle is the only reliable form of transportation that they can afford. The Bicycle Collective is their shop.
“Transportation is the most significant barrier to economic mobility,” said McAleer. “If you cannot get yourself from point A to point B, you can’t get yourself to a job interview. You can’t get yourself to a job. You may not be able to go to the grocery store or attend a medical appointment.” The Collective sells bikes that regular people can afford, bikes that may not look fancy or have all the modern accoutrements but will get you there and home again all the same. According to Thomas Cooke, the nonprofit’s digital strategist, the average price of the bikes they sold in 2022 was $282. “It’s really about providing accessibility to all people, regardless of economic status,” said Cooke. “This is where you can get a bike to commute. You can get a bike for your kids for Christmas. You can get an economical mountain bike. You can find a cool, old road bike that brings back memories of riding in college. We have all of it.”
I will admit that an old Marin mountain bike, resplendent in the red, green, and yellow paint of its era, caught my eye. It was priced to sell, and I should have pulled the trigger; when I visited the shop a few days later, it was gone. All the bikes in the shop had been donated to the Collective. Once a bike is donated, staff and volunteers evaluate it to determine whether it can be fixed up and sold or stripped of usable parts and sent to the recycler. The Collective then sells refurbished bikes and components to both thrifty commuters and enthusiasts with an eye for vintage gear.
The Bicycle Collective has always funded its programming partly from bike and parts sales, but the COVID pandemic of 2020 provided some new opportunities. “We started doing service — we had never done that before — because the local bike shops were three weeks backed up,” Cooke told me. “Everybody was riding bikes, right? So that’s something that became a new revenue stream for us.” The Collective also found new ways to sell its bikes and gear by posting sales online and creating an e-commerce platform. “We’re now able to sell any type of product: bizarre, handmade high-end, or vintage high-end, we can find a buyer anywhere in the country or anywhere in the world and then put those proceeds to use,” said Murphy. “We’ll take your old race componentry. We can find a buyer for that frameset that you’ve been done with for years. And when we find the buyer for it, we’re going to take that money and we’re going to put it directly into this programming over here.”
The Bicycle Collective’s social programming is extensive: community classes on bike maintenance, including a youth class and a women-trans-femme class; open shop time, in which you can rent a workbench and fix up your bike; work trade, in which you can volunteer six hours in exchange for a bike; and Bikes for Goodwill, a program through which refurbished bikes are donated to those in need.
This is what McAleer describes as the Bicycle Collective’s two-part mission: sell bikes and give bikes away, with the former action funding the latter (selling bikes and parts accounts for 60 percent of the nonprofit’s funding; the rest comes from charitable donations). But they’re not giving bikes away to just anyone — the Bicycle Collective partners with local organizations to vet recipients. For example, the Collective partners with the International Rescue Committee to give bikes to newly arrived refugees. As McAleer explained, Salt Lake City is one of 20 cities that are major hubs for refugee resettlement in the U.S. Many of these people are fleeing violence and persecution and arrive in this country with only what they can carry, so having a bike to get around makes a big difference in their lives.
In 2022, the Collective gave more than 1,500 bikes to both children and adults, according to their annual report from that year. That’s a lot of bikes to strip, clean, repair, and refurbish, and there are only so many paid staffers. Like a lot of nonprofits, the Bicycle Collective leans heavily on volunteers. “Our volunteers are the lifeblood of this organization,” said McAleer. “They enable us to do a lot of the things we do. We have more than 500-plus volunteers who invest more than 8,200 hours annually in helping repair bikes.”
One of the volunteers I bumped into at the Bicycle Collective was Lou Melini, who has been volunteering at the shop for the last six years. “It’s a perfect fit,” he told me, laughing. “They can’t fire me, and they can’t cut my pay.” Melini, 72, is retired from a career in nursing and volunteers twice a week restoring kids’ bikes and teaching kids basic bike maintenance. He believes in the mission, he said, and he believes in the power of bikes to change lives. (When we first started chatting, Melini didn’t know what publication I work for. It turns out he’s a Life Member of Adventure Cycling! He rode across the U.S. in 1975 and was introduced to Greg Siple and Bikecentennial while passing through Missoula, Montana.)
Kai Cox started volunteering for the Bicycle Collective in 2012. After working at a community bike shop in Boise, Idaho, for a year, and wrenching at the Provo location for a while, Cox is now the director of the Salt Lake City shop. Cox explained that his job involves “real bike nerdery,” that the bikes they get are often older and, as such, can be harder to work with. “I spend a lot of time on Sheldon Brown,” he said, referring to the late bike guru’s still-functioning, still-irreplaceable website. His job involves a lot of “spinning plates and putting out fires,” he told me, but he gets a lot of satisfaction from working with people who rely on bikes for transportation and helping them grow their mechanic skills. He wants to encourage anyone local to get involved.
Anyone who does volunteer at the Bicycle Collective will note that big things are happening these days for the Utah nonprofit. In October last year, with Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall and a few city council members, the Collective broke ground on what later this year will be its new headquarters building. But instead of leasing and continually getting blown to and fro by the fickle winds of the commercial rental market, this building the Bicycle Collective will own. (Currently, only the Ogden location owns its building.)
In 2017, the Collective won a competitive bidding process with the Redevelopment Agency of Salt Lake City for the parcel of land on which the new hub is being built. Then began the arduous process of raising funds for construction costs. After several rounds of fundraising — as well as a rude interruption by the COVID pandemic — and a bridge loan, construction is underway. McAleer told me they’re hoping to occupy the new headquarters by November of this year.
It helps that the Bicycle Collective had an ace in the hole: Board Chair Murphy works in real estate development and put all his skills to use in applying for that bid. “I know very well what the pressures of real estate speculation and development are doing in the state,” he told me. “And I know what’s also happened to a lot of other nonprofit organizations that didn’t own the space that they were in.” Not only will the Bicycle Collective own its new space, it’ll be in a much better, safer, and easier-to-access location. Crime has been an issue at the current building. “We get regular break-ins, regular smash-and-grabs,” Murphy told me. McAleer said they’d even had catalytic converters stolen from their vehicles. (Indeed, during my interview with McAleer and Cooke, one of the mechanics, Enoch, politely interrupted to insist that I bring my bike inside the shop. I acquiesced.)
The new location, in the up-and-coming Granary District, is in a more residential area and will be more accessible to people pedaling or using transit. “They can access us on two different Trax [light rail] stops, two different bus lines, and the premier bikeway of all of northern Salt Lake County stretching from east to west on the 9 Line,” said Murphy.
“After this, the Bike Collective will own that building,” he went on, “but really, that means the community owns that building.” Another big advantage to the new hub will be, simply, more space. “This shop is kind of two things,” said Murphy. “One, it’s our local Salt Lake City community shop. But it’s also an opportunity to create a functional, professional environment. Currently, our Salt Lake staff sit atop one another, if they can find a seat at all. Some are forced to work from home because there’s no space in the shop. We’re changing that dynamic.” In addition to a larger retail space and a more open work area on the ground floor, the design for the new building includes offices and meeting spaces on the upper level. That way, work and shopping can continue unobstructed downstairs while board meetings and classes go on upstairs.
While I was speaking with Cox, the shop director, I brought up the sweet Co-Motion I’d seen on the sales rack. Like all the bikes they refurbish and sell, that Co-Motion, too, had been donated, which seems awfully generous. Aside from being new and shiny, the Co-Motion also stood out because of its price tag: $4,000. That’s a lot more than the $250 or $350 I was seeing on most of the bikes. What Cox explained about that price solidified in my mind the notion of the Bicycle Collective as a necessary community resource, not just a shop selling cool bikes. He told me that a $4,000 sale equates to 40 bike donations. That’s 40 people — refugees, kids, people without housing or jobs, people recovering from addiction — who can have safe, reliable transportation to their jobs, doctor’s appointments, or therapy sessions who didn’t have that before.
“I’ve worked at bike shops, I’ve worked as a rep, I’ve worked in-house for different cycling companies, manufacturing, everything,” said Cooke, the organization’s digital strategist. “When you work here, when you volunteer here, you get to experience actually giving somebody a bike and the thank you and the smile. You know, it’s potentially life changing to some people.”
Cooke added with a smile, “It’s kind of cool to be doing something with bikes that also has that social impact.”
