Community Cycles Volunteer and Earn-a-Bike Opportunities for August 11, 2009

[veganb...@gmail.com]

Hey All,

The Bicycle Film Festival is coming to town. ON THURSDAY. See the bottom of this email for details from them about their event. It's not a Community Cycles event, but it's sure to be a good time with some great films. I know I'll be there. Come out and say hello and watch some awesome bike movies.

Also, a lot of you may not be aware that in addition to these emails, we have a monthly E-Newsletter which heralds all the events we have coming up, and our accomplishments for the month. It's a great way to find out what we've been up to that doesn't make it into these emails. If you're interested in getting one of those emails per month, please let me know and I'll subscribe you.

And while it's not volunteer related, it is bike related, and it's in Boulder, so I'm bringing it up. On the front page of our website is our policy statement about what's been happening with the 30th St. underpass. Please take a moment and check it out, and drop a line to one or more city council members. And don't forget to forward this information on to your friends. It's an important element in Boulder's complete bike awesomeness, and it would be a shame to see it derailed at this point.

Those of you looking to get hours for your Earn-a-Bike (EAB) will want to keep an eye out for the italicized text below.
 As we get better at keeping the shop organized, and move forward as an organization, dropping by the shop to is becoming less and less of a realistic option for getting hours. We're looking into an option for folks to be able to schedule their hours in advance. I'd be interested in hearing back from anyone with feedback on such an idea. For now, check out what's coming up, and let me know at which events you'd like to help out.

As always, if you know of someone else who would like to be involved in Community Cycles, please feel free to forward this email, or my contact info to them.

Thanks again, everyone.

Josh Brown
Development Director
Community Cycles
720-565-6019
jo...@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 on the 26th, 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.

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.

Volunteer Orientation, Thursday, August 13th, 6 PM to 7 PM, at Community Cycles
Come and get a tour of our space and find out where we could most use you!  If you haven't been to a Volunteer Orientation, it's a great way to learn more about who we are and what we do. More importantly, it's a great way to find out how we can work together to make Boulder a better town in which to bike. Bring a friend for more fun!

Earn-a-Bike Participants are welcome and invited to join us at Volunteer Orientations and participate. Participation in the meeting will not count towards Earn-a-Bike hours, but it is a great way to learn about everything we have going on here, and how you can get involved, specifically outside of normal shop hours.

Rolling Bike Clinic at Boulder Steelyards,
12 - 4PM Saturday, August 22nd

What's a Rolling Bike Clinic, you ask? This is one of my favorite things that we do, and if we didn't do anything else, this might be the thing I vote for us to keep doing. We'll load up the bike trailers with tools and parts and head over to the Mapleton neighborhood and fix bikes for a day.  I highly encourage any of you who want to work on bikes or just get out there and make some change in a real way on a local level come out and help with this.

We have three broad goals with the Rolling Bike Clinics:

   1. Fix bikes
   2. Teach Bike safety
   3. Introduce residents to the Boulder path system

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.

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, components & 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. Is anyone still reading this? Free beer! All you have to do is sit there with me and talk to folks about Community Cycles! And you can earn hours!
Yes, I said FREE BEER.
 
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.

You can earn EAB hours staffing our booth, but  you'll need to get in touch with me quickly, as this will be a high demand event.

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
Training for this will be on Tuesday, August 18th, from noon to 1 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 8. 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 a training day on the 18th, to go over the plan and the day's schedule, attendance at this meeting will count towards EAB hours.

Greeter trainings have moved to Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays,
from 10:45 AM to 2:15 PM, and 2:15 to 6:15 PM.

We need folks to come in and help out in the office. Answer phones, greet Earn-a-Bikers, explain who we are and what we do to shop visitors. There is some data entry involved, and people persons are encouraged to help out with this. No mechanical experience is needed to help in the office. Helping out as a greeter does mean there's about an hour of training involved, so interested parties should be willing to commit to several shifts as a greeter once they've been trained. The greeter is the first person most people encounter when they come into Community Cycles, and as such is super important to the shop being able to run smoothly.

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.
Water Cooler Stand/Base, for 5 gallon water bottles, preferably the type with the internal electric cooler, not the ceramic base.



Bicycle Film Festival, Thursday, August 13, Old Main Theatre, CU Campus

Again, this isn't a Community Cycles event, so you can't earn hours there. But you can earn some fun for yourself. Just show up and the fun happens on it's own.

ONE NIGHT ONLY! THE NINTH ANNUAL BICYCLE FILM FESTIVAL, PRESENTED BY 42BELOW, ROLLS THROUGH BOULDER FOR THE FIRST TIME! – AUGUST 13TH Boulder, CO (August 2009) – This summer, The Bicycle Film Festival, presented by 42BELOW, rolls through Boulder for ONE NIGHT to present a cultural phenomenon like no other. Originating in New York City, the festival is a voice for the most powerful and culturally relevant movement of the past decade: the urban bike movement. The BFF brings together many creative communities, including fashion, music and art as well as various bicycling communities – including fixed gear, BMX, and road cycling - over a shared passion for bike riding. Coming to Boulder for the first time in its nine-year history, The Bicycle Film Festival spends one night – August 13th – of bike films at Old Main Theater (Pleasant Street & Old Main). We will be showing two programs at 7pm and 9pm featuring various shorts and one feature film. At 7pm, join us for the feature film Where Are You Go directed by Benny Zenga and Brian Vernor. Documenting four months on a bicycle between Cairo, Egypt and Cape Town, South Africa en route with the Tour d' Afrique, the world's longest bicycle race and expedition, BFF Alumni the Zenga Bros. and Brian Vernor share a universal love of the bicycle with Africa's roadside mechanics, sporting racers and curious strangers. Traveling more than 70 miles per day, 50 racers and expedition riders experienced the boundless Nubian desert of Sudan, the great majesty of Victoria Falls, and finally the cold rush of the Atlantic Ocean. The 7,000 mile expedition is a constant adventure full of playfulness and mysterious beauty, and is a testament to the endurance of human curiosity. Later at 9pm, we screen various Fun Bike Shorts including Made in Queens, directed by Joe Stevens and Nicholas Randall. In Queens, a group of teens from Trinidad attached speakers to their bikes. The music was never quite loud enough and they had to go bigger and bigger with the sound systems. We are also showing Anima D’Acciaio (Soul of Steel) – a portrait of the legendary Italian frame Builder Giovanni Pelizzoli aka "Ciocc" . Ciocc shares his wisdom and life story while hand building a revolutionary new frame for urban fixed gear cycling. Ciocc demonstrates that the tradition and craft of frame building’s Golden age can be re-born and push the technical frontier of Cycling's future. Also features Ed "Wonka" La Forte and Antonio Colombo with an original soundtrack by Blonde Redhead. Directly following the second program, join us for the after party to close the one-night only Bicycle Film Festival in Boulder. Please check the website, www.bicyclefilmfestival.com, for the complete details. As a special part of the Bicycle Film Festival, 42BELOW Vodka is putting out a call to action to take part in supporting the Alliance for Biking & Walking by encouraging tweeters to follow the ride on Twitter (twitter.com/WeLikeBike42). If 20,000 people follow the ride on Twitter, 42BELOW will make a $42K donation to the Alliance. To purchase tickets and see a full list of events in Boulder for the Bicycle Film Festival, please visit www.bicyclefilmfestival.com. About the Bicycle Film Festival: In 2001, Brendt Barbur, Founder and Director, was compelled to start the Bicycle Film Festival after being hit by a bus while riding his bike in New York City. Instead of being deterred by this experience, it inspired him to create a festival that celebrates the bicycle through music, art, and film. Now in its ninth year the festival is held in 39 cities worldwide. 250,000 people are expected to attend this year. The 9th annual Bicycle Film Festival North American Tour is presented by 42 BELOW Vodka. For more information please visit the website at www.bicyclefilmfestival.com; for media inquiries, please contact Jill Meisner at ji...@bicyclefilmfestival.com, or 646.498.8431.