Community Cycles Volunteer and Earn-a-Bike Opportunities for August 15, 2009

[Josh Brown]

Hey Everyone.

First, it's my birthday! I'm a whopping 33 today. Thanks, Mom and Dad.

Second, some great news for those of you earning bikes. We now have a system in the shop office for scheduling hours for time in the shop! You can book as many hours to be earned as we have available, up to 3 weeks in the future. Earn-a-Bikers, watch for more italicized text. It's directed at you.

We do still need help at the events listed below, so take a look and drop me a line if anything looks interesting to you.

 Thanks as always, and see you soon!

Josh Brown
Development Director
Community Cycles
720-565-6019
jo...@communitycycles.org

Volkswagen mechanic needed.
We're good at bike mechanics. Our van is feeling neglected as a result. If anyone knows how these things work, ours could use some love. This one's for experienced mechanics only, but you can earn hours doing it, if you can give it the care it needs.
If you're interested, please email ri...@communitycycles.org

Experienced wrench day at North Storage, Sunday, August 16, Noon to 5 PM
All those bikes that we've been working on for the Student Sale are almost close to being done. We just need experienced mechanics to come help us tweak them to get them perfect. We'll be there from noon to 5 PM on this Sunday.
For info, please contact ri...@communitycycles.org.

North Storage Work Parties, Mondays 4-8 PM, Wednesdays 4-8 PM Through Aug 24
This is the easiest way to both learn some bike mechanics, and earn hours towards your Earn-a-Bike.
We have much more capacity for help and workers up at this location. We can handle about 20-30 volunteers. We've got about 400 bikes in our North Storage Facility. We'd like to have 200 or more tuned up and ready to sell by the Student Sale (see below for info on that), when students get back. We cannot get nearly this many done on our own. We need your help for this, in a big way. We're there every week, on Mondays from 4 to 8 PM, and Wednesdays from 4 to 8 PM. We work out of a donated Boulder County space, so we don't publish the address on our website, but here is a google map and the address of the building.

Earn-a-Bikers, if you can at all make it when we start the evening, (4 PM on Monday, 4 PM on Wednesday,) that would make our world much easier, as we can teach everyone the evening's lesson all at once.

After the Student Sale, we won't be working in North Boulder twice a week, but we may still be up there once a week. We'll have details about which day and how often once we get it figured out. If there's a night that works better for you than another, please email me and let me know, and we'll keep that in mind when we schedule our regular North Storage Worknights.

Training for Venus De Miles Valet Bike Parking
Tuesday, August 18th, from noon to 1 PM
We're parking bikes for the fine ladies who will be riding on the Venus De Miles ride at the end of the month. Tuesday, the 18th, we'll meet at  the shop at noon to go over what bike parking means and what it will look like.

Rocky Mountain Bike Show
Saturday, and Sunday, August 22nd through 23rd
Join us August 22nd & 23rd at the National Western Complex in Denver for the nation's most exciting bicycle show.
Come see the finest custom frame-builders, production bike manufacturers, sports nutrition, component &
accessory companies and much more.
See www.rmbshow.com for more info.
Community Cycles will have a booth with information about Community Cycles for the show visitors.
I need some help getting the word out about who we are and what we do. No mechanical experience, but bike geeks are encouraged not to miss out on this one. There will be local microbrewers on hand, with free samples. That's right, free beer! All you have to do is sit there with me and talk to folks about Community Cycles! And you can earn hours!
This is sure to be a really fun event, and I'm sure lots of folks will be interested, but we can only get one or two folks in per day. Please get back to me ASAP if you want to join us at our booth.

Rolling Bike Clinic at Boulder Steelyards,

12 - 4PM Saturday, August 22nd

We need all levels of mechanical ability, from novices who've never touched a bike or a wrench to those of you who know how to build wheels. Experience working with kids is definitely helpful, but not at all required. If you'd like to help with the Steelyards Rolling Bike Clinic, meet us at the shop around 11:30AM and ride out around 11:40AM.  Or you can also meet us at the Steelyards park, located at 19th and Violet.  Help for an hour or the whole event.

You can earn EAB hours working at the Rolling Bike Clinics. Please check in ahead of time if you're going to earn hours helping with the Rolling Bike Clinic.

Student Sale, August 26, 8 AM to 6 PM, on campus
We've got something big planned for this one. Those of you who helped out with the Cruiser Sale know what I'm talking about.
CU wants to welcome students back with bikes. We're hoping to have 200 bikes tuned up and ready to sell to incoming and returning CU students. We've got a little over a month to go to make this happen. We're definitely going to need help in prepping bikes and on the day of. If you're interested in being involved, please let me know.

You can definitely earn EAB hours working on the Student Sale. Let me know if you're interested and I'll let you know the details.

Valet Bike Parking at Venus De Miles Sunday, August 30th, 8:00 AM to 3:00 PM

Venus de Miles, an all-woman charity ride, has asked Community Cycles to help them with some Valet Bike Parking at their event in Longmont on August 30th.
We cannot do this without at least 20 committed volunteers. At the moment, we have 6. We very much need your help to pull this off.
If you're reading this, please please please consider helping us out with  this event.
 This is also a great chance to help us raise money, work for an awesome event, and meet lots of ladies and families who don't know about Community Cycles. What will it mean for you? Our workday will start around 8 AM, and go until 2:30. We'll need folks to help accept, tag and retrieve bikes for customers, as well as setup and take down the bike parking racks. We'll especially need help at the beginning and end of the day. During the middle of the day, you're free to visit the other booths at the fest, which will include all kinds of green and natural living companies.

This is a really fun and easy way to contribute in a bigger way than just helping in the shop. We need a ton of people for this, and we'd love to have as many EAB participants helping as possible. There's quite a bit of setup and planning involved in this,
so we'll need to get starting working together as soon as possible
if we're going to make this happen.

You can earn EAB hours helping with this event. It's a super easy and fun way to rack them up quickly. If you know of someone who's interested in the EAB program, and wants to get some quick hours, this is the event for them. There will be at least one pre-event meeting, to go over the plan and the day's schedule, which will count towards EAB hours.

Wish List Items

If any of you have any of the following items you could do without, we can use them. Bring them in any time, if you can.

T-Shirts to use as rags
Toothbrushes, old, new, electric, whatever.
AA batteries--these should be new, as we can't use old ones.
Wooden stools, short or tall.
Electric Water Cooler Stand/Base, for 5 or 3 gallon water bottles, preferably the type with the internal electric cooler, not a ceramic base.
3 or 5 Gallon reusable screw cap type water bottles, to go with the base.