In 2024, we are again partnering with Operation Food Search (operation backpack)!
Join St. Louis BWorks for this year’s Cranksgiving — starting and ending at 2nd Shift Brewing!
For nearly two decades now, St. Louis BWorks has put on an annual Cranksgiving canned food drive by bicycle. This year’s extravaganza will benefit Operation Food Search!
The BWorks team will have a registration check-in table with short release forms to fill out (and beer tickets to hand out) at the brewery starting at 9:30 a.m. for a 10 a.m. ride start. If you can, print and fill out the form in advance (here is the link), and bring it with you to the event to hand to BWorks team members. That really helps save time and is much appreciated where feasible!
When and where
The Sunday, November 10, ride will begin and end at 2nd Shift Brewing! Shorter and longer route options (approximately 7, 12 and 20 miles) will be emailed to registrants by the night prior using MapMyRide (please take a good look at your chosen route before arriving!). Weather allowing, routes will be marked.
Route advisory
We strive to use low-traffic streets. That said, all streets will be open to the public, and we ask you to share the road and exercise caution throughout the event.
Other stuff
One drink ticket will be included at registration check-in, redeemable at 2nd Shift Brewing AFTER you have completed your ride. (Thank you so much, 2nd Shift, for providing both beer and N/A options including Busy Bee Root Beer!)
Parking
Plenty of street parking is along Sublette Ave. Please do not park in the 2nd Shift parking lot, and better yet, try riding to the event!
To keep in mind
While there will be some optional grocery-store stops along the routes, your $20 (or more!) donation will go further by allowing Operation Food Search (receives $15 per rider) to buy more strategically and in bulk with the collected funds. Meanwhile, BWorks (receives $5 per rider) will use its share of the funds to purchase healthy fresh snacks for our Earn-A-Bike and Learn-To-Ride courses with local youth.
What a wonderful day it’s been in the bistate region: 10 local bike-to-school groups — each part of a growing international children’s active transportation movement known as “bike buses” (a play on “school buses”) — all pedaled their way to St. Louis-area schools today, with guidance from crews of dedicated adult helpers.
On the Missouri side, five different groups of children started at various locations across south city, eventually merging into one huge wave of riders en route to an elementary school in south city. Meanwhile, on the Illinois side, five other bike buses, plus a walking bus, headed out to five different schools in Edwardsville! BWorks staff joined in at different locations in both states on their day off to help.
Everyone was awake, excited and engaged by the time we got to school — at least all the kids were, as parents and other volunteers sought out coffee upon arrival. :) Numerous studies both locally and nationally show that kids who get to engage in physical activity before school are more awake, engaged, have less behavioral referrals and, over all, test better.
In St. Louis City, we heard kids happily shouting, “I’m riding my bike to school!!” (There were also suggestions that Spire road plates be turned into jump ramps for kids on bikes.) The excitement and joy is always high as these young cyclists build their skills and confidence, while also surely feeling like a million bucks as caring adult riders center these kids’ rights to safely move around their communities and make their way to school.
But the joy is tempered by a comment we’ve heard from kids multiple times over the years: “Why can’t every day be a bike bus day?”
Studies show that the main issue that keeps bike buses from running more consistently is not infrastructure or enforcement, but dependency on volunteers. (As one obvious example, this morning’s combined south-city group of well over 80 children plus all of the volunteer helpers had no safe infrastructure to depend on as we wound several miles through residential streets and crossed Grand, Jefferson and Gravois. The infrastructure we all thirst for is simply not available at this point, and won’t be until many of these kids have their own kids. But these rides prove that groups of kids with adult support, encouragement and safety-focused education can ride a bike to school safely en masse.)
Why can’t we ride every day, or even every week through the school year? It’s the dependency on volunteers’ time. The time and energy to coordinate multiple levels of logistics and safety preparations, map students’ home locations, make routes, handle liability and communicate with busy parents is significant indeed. It’s joyful, and difficult, work.
Yet as local, regional and national transportation-planning leaders grapple with escalating traffic violence, active youth transportation efforts mostly receive little to no funding. This is despite how inexpensive such programming is compared to infrastructure. And so the situation remains: If we want active youth transportation, we must depend on volunteers. And to be clear: Today’s volunteers on both the Missouri and Illinois routes were and are amazing, and clearly happy to help. But these people also have to make a living.
And so that really is the answer to the kids’ very reasonable and oft-repeated question of why we can’t do the bike bus daily or weekly — that these caring volunteers all have other responsibilities. But underlying that answer is, of course, a more disturbing fact: that despite many millions of dollars available right now, for example, in the City of St. Louis — funds we’ve all been told are supposed to be spent on making life better here — not one of those dollars is being made available for children’s active transportation activities such as bike buses. This is even as leaders tout plans to sink $300 million into infrastructure in the next few years.
This morning’s 10 bike buses to schools around the region embody the world that so many of us on the BWorks team and among our partner organizations dream of. We continue to work hard to create that world in small and big ways, day by day. These efforts are well deserving of support.
St. Louis BWorks has worked with many partners over the past couple of years alone, including, for the first time ever, the City’s Department of Parks & Recreation. In the last year and a half, the BWorks education team prepared four different six-week-long Earn-A-Bike cohorts at City-owned-and-operated rec centers, with multiple BWorks teachers committing time, energy and talents to these efforts.
However, in every case, the City did not adequately hold up its end of the contract, which BWorks has now canceled as we move on to other class offerings to fill the gaps and make the most of our capacity to meet ongoing demand for our Earn-A-Bike, Learn-To-Ride and Earn-A-Computer offerings.
We’ve begun moving students who were scheduled to complete Earn-A-Bike at one local rec center earlier this month to other cohorts at other locations, and any families affected who still are in search of a solution may contact our programs director at evie@bworks.org.
The most frustrating and frequent issue, including with the most recent cohort, is that often there has been no one on site at a given City rec center to open the building for our teachers, students and families. This is despite multiple site visits and in-person conversations, and many phone calls and emails in advance to the department to ensure all are on the same page. It’s unfortunate and unfair that these facilities can’t be opened on time, as agreed, when families are waiting outside for programs. We won’t ask local children to have class on the sidewalk any more than we already have due to these situations.
We’ve also had the City leave us in the lurch, days away from a planned six-week course at one of the rec centers, with a staffer texting us that routine maintenance on the building would leave the facility unavailable during the class. BWorks scrambled and secured an alternative location for the group in that case, knowing these families had blocked out six weeks of time once a week to commit to the class, and wanting to do right by them despite the failure on the City’s part.
On top of all of this, we have been told we must not recruit to fill these classes, that the programs are for “OUR kids.” We are still lost on what these comments, received by BWorks team members from several different people within the city parks department, are about. Are programs only for kids already involved at recreation centers? Is there no value in getting new local kids at these centers in their neighborhoods?
In every case, we abided by the department’s insistence that we not try to recruit kids in our shared community ourselves, but predictably, classes were not filling up, because of an outdated, overly complicated registration system families were forced to use (RecDesk). And so a week or so out from each course launch, knowing BWorks has many folks on waitlists for our classes at our headquarters and other partner locations, we would hustle to start making calls and emails to fill empty spots (which is why three of the four cohorts still ended up with a significant number of students). But this has been totally unmanageable as a system for registering students for a multi-week commitment.
The parks department seems unwilling to grapple with the need for programming providers to have information about registrants and key contact info for their caregivers, and the need for both BWorks and families to be in communication about plans well in advance.
We shared these concerns with elected officials, including the City committee, early last week, and have yet to receive any meaningful response to our expressed concerns or requests for help on next steps. BWorks is asking that City-based funding for recreation not be tied solely to the recreation centers, and that funding for programs be available for use in any of our amazing community parks instead. Removing this barrier would allow groups such as ours to act independently and deliver the programs we are good at, while removing the unnecessary roadblocks to our own residents.
We share this unfortunate situation not out of any sort of spite but truly because St. Louisans deserve consistently accessible, welcoming rec centers. St. Louis residents deserve, and could have, better. BWorks deserves better too, in exchange for a lot of hard work that went into these four cohorts – four of more than 100 groups of children and teens we have served in the past year and a half.
Students successfully completing the Earn A Bike programs at the Cherokee Rec Center.
The BWorks team is excited to have recently welcomed Wesley Wilcox as a part-time bike mechanic. It was just a handful of years ago that Wesley completed the Earn-A-Bike program growing up, and now he is busy refurbishing bikes for current students.
We recently checked in with Wesley, who began working with us earlier this summer, to hear how things are going so far and learn more about his love for the world of bicycles, and particularly BMX.
He said bikes have long been an important aspect of his life, even when he was very young. One of his earliest bike-related memories took place in a local library.
“I’ve always been interested in jumping stuff and making little ramps and stuff,” Wesley explained. “But as a kid, I actually found a book at the library about BMX racing, and I thought, ‘Oh, this is sick.’”
By age 10, he was regularly spending time at Benton Park-headquartered Ramp Riders, an indoor skate park and pro shop, and by 12 or 13 he was volunteering there. Then in high school he landed a job at the facility, where he still plays an important role.
“My family’s just always been a big bike family,” Wesley said.
He’s especially invested in the culture and history of BMX. He films videos, and has a sponsorship with Animal Bikes. But he also does a lot of riding on his mountain bike and road bike around the St. Louis area.
“It’s freedom,” Wesley said. “You can get from Point A to Point B really easily. I feel like in the city at least you can get places easier on a bike sometimes.”
He uses his bikes for everything, including food delivery at times.
“I load up my bike trailer with laundry, I go to the farmer’s market, I go to shows,” Wesley explained. “It’s very fun, it’s very relaxing and takes my mind off things. I just go out and explore the city on my bike for a couple hours.”
That sort of freedom and utility, both as a kid and now as an adult, is something Wesley wants to see every young person experience. When he’s at the shop, his enthusiasm while working on a BWorks student’s selected stead is obvious and infectious.
“I love getting kids on bikes,” he said. “Whenever I’m building a bike, I want the kid to be hyped up about the bike.”
