Join us in helping purchase some brand new Batch Bikes for our amazing kids! Bworks will be purchasing some 24″ kids bikes to help fill out the bikes we have available for our kids in Earn A Bike!
Can’t join us for this bike build? Don’t worry, your donation will be built by our amazing elves!
For more info = Info @Bworks.org
After almost 40 years of helping put young people on bikes, it’s only fitting that we start to see the next generation attending BWorks programs. In just the past couple months we have had two different students share that one of their parents remembers attending BWorks programs when they were young!
That includes recent Learn-To-Ride graduate Kyndal. Her mom, Ashley Walker, recently took the time to recall some of her fondest memories of BWorks as a child. Ashley tells us that one of the main volunteers who worked with her years ago was named Cindy, who would accompany the students on weekend rides “as we would build up our endurance to tackle the ultimate challenge, which was our big ride and campout.” Eventually, over the course of a couple years of involvement in alumni rides, Ashley and other students completed the entire Katy Trail within four or five days.
“I did not miss a mile, and I was so proud of myself,” she recalls.
BWorks’ headquarters were smaller at the time, located in the Shaw neighborhood, than the current BWorks digs where Ashley’s daughter, Kyndal, recently attended classes. But as much as some things have changed, the heart of the operation still feels familiar to Ashley as she watches her daughter now participating in the programs, including Learn-To-Ride.
“She was initially nervous to remove her training wheels, but I knew that once she gained the confidence she would love biking like I did,” Ashley says. “She met a new friend [in Learn-To-Ride], and she is learning new skills and surprising herself with her achievements. She is learning to be more aware and having self control, both vital skills for life. This is a full-circle experience to have my daughter come through the program and learn about bicycles just like me.”
The importance of both being able to ride safely and take care of one’s bike is a life lesson that still sticks with Ashley. Even if she doesn’t remember every detail, she still recalls “many of the basics.” And the underlying confidence BWorks programs instilled in her was huge.
“As a child, I learned that I could challenge myself and push beyond my soreness and complete many miles of biking. … I also learned that I could do basic repairs on my bike and that I could navigate driving with traffic from the programs at BWorks.”
Ashley adds that she’s grateful to the current BWorks team for its commitment to teaching kids important life skills.
“Thanks for being a part of our village to help Kyndal gain confidence in herself and her abilities,” she says. Comment end
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!
Here’s the deets:
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.
Three cheers for the bike bus,
Patrick Van Der Tuin,
executive director
St. Louis BWorks