Gearing up for giving back

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/11/2020 (1246 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the wee hours of a crisp Sunday morning last December, I biked to the Orioles Community Club for my shift at the Cycle of Giving 24-hour kids’ bike-building marathon. This annual event, organized by the Winnipeg Repair Education and Cycling Hub (the WRENCH), aims to fully refurbish bikes and put them into the hands of children who need them.

It’s an organizational feat and a party-and-a-half rolled into one. Walking into the familiar community centre, I was greeted by volunteers, fed a breakfast burrito and coffee before walking past a crowd of kids decorating cards to go with the bikes.

Hundreds of completed bikes were already piled outside by the skating rink. We were pretty much guaranteed to hit the target of 500 by the end of my mechanical shift.

If you have ever wanted to feel like an elf in the days leading up to Christmas, the Cycle of Giving is the place to do it. The event brings together mechanics from retail and community-based shops, cycling teams, bicycle couriers, families, handy home mechanics, local musicians (they provide the entertainment) and local businesses donating food and other supplies. The event itself gets better every year and it is such a pleasure to focus on one bike at a time, repairing it while imagining the fun that will be had by a child riding that bike, being outside and exploring their neigbourhood.

On Dec. 5, the Cycle of Giving is launching a fundraiser to support much needed above ground space for the WRENCH. In its 10th year, the organization is making some COVID-related changes to fundraising while broadening its vision beyond its current home in the basement of the City of Winnipeg’s Animal Services building on Logan Avenue.

Volunteers, staff, and board members with the registered charity have been sharing bike know-how, building bike infrastructure, and creating a culture of cycling in Winnipeg since before the WRENCH came to be. Since its inception, the bike shop has recovered hundreds of thousands of kilograms of bikes and bike parts from Winnipeg’s 4R sites over the years. Through volunteer labour, sweat equity, community programs, and also staff, those bikes are put to good use for youth and families looking for a way to get around.

The organization’s next chapter is part and parcel of many Winnipeggers’ re-envisioning a city largely built for cars and working through multiple projects to make space for bicycles.

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In spring 2006, there were a series of Critical Mass bike rides in Winnipeg, inspired by similar events in other cities, staged as a form of direct action to create a safe place for cyclists.

The rides exploded in attendance that summer after police ticketed and targeted cyclists during a planned group ride. The largest rides that summer had hundreds of participants and the mood was celebratory with lots of ringing bells and joy from being able to ride freely with others.

The large rides were a protest of the treatment of cyclists by police and fellow road users and were also arguably a demand for safer biking infrastructure and community spaces; they also served as a catalyst for the creation of advocacy group, Bike Winnipeg.

Many of the people who attended those rides can now be found working for, volunteering with or sitting on the boards of Winnipeg bike organizations including the WRENCH.

Community bike shops differ from commercial shops because of their focus on education, community building and ensuring costs are not a barrier. The international network of community bike shops are generally guided by an ethos of mutual aid, anti-oppression and anti-capitalism and they host an annual conference called Bike!Bike!, which has been held for the last 15 years across the Americas.

Winnipeg is known for having the most community bike shops per capita. The WRENCH is the biggest community bike shop in the city with the most programming, as well as partnerships with schools, community organizations and institutions.

There is a community bike shop affiliated with each of Winnipeg’s universities, as well as in schools and many neighbourhoods. Community shops are centres for reuse and repair. The WRENCH works with the City of Winnipeg 4R Depots and all the usable bikes and parts left at the 4R Depots are sorted and used by the WRENCH or distributed to other community shops.

Community bike shops and other bike organizations in Winnipeg work with government, consult with community and also they often just see a need and do what needs to be done. They are the kind of community where after-work drinks at the Yellow Dog Tavern in the Exchange can lead to a new project idea called Ramp Up only because the Yellow Dog needed a ramp to be more accessible. Businesses or organizations that need a ramp to make their buildings more accessible can call the Ramp Up department of Winnipeg Trails and get a ramp built and painted (or left as a blank canvas for an art project) for $200 or any amount more in order to support the work of Winnipeg Trails.

The tradition of group rides has continued on since those rides of 2006. These group rides have taken many forms, probably the most epic being the Rainbow Trout Music Festival Bike Jams which have brought hundreds and sometimes thousands (for Nuit Blanche) of people together to ride the streets of Winnipeg after dark with music pumping from bikes and trikes with sound systems.

Other important group rides, often as part of Bike Week, focus on bringing people who are underserved by the commercial cycling industry. Ride Outside the Lines, a ride celebrating women and non-binary folks, was well attended example in 2018.

Traditional Trails is a group tour — more than just a group ride — and started with Indigenous cyclists Adrian Alphonso and Justin Bear L’Arrivee who wanted to do something for Indigenous youth led by Indigenous youth, connecting in a contemporary way.

“We are contemporary people and we are modern and what is the best way to move people? Obviously it’s by bike,” Alphonso has said.

Traditional Trails has involved different rides such as a Métis history ride, a treaty ride with Allen Sutherland, a medicine ride with Audrey Logan and an oral history ride based on the oral history walk at The Forks.

Alphonso says the Métis ride explores the relationship of the Métis with Canada, the current situation of Métis and what the future would look like with the implementation of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People.

“What does it look like for all people to live on this land and territory?”

The overall goal of Traditional Trails is “connecting with Indigenous cyclists and building interest and capacity with our youth,” explains L’Arrivee, “using cycling as a mechanism for living in an Indigenous way.”

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The truth is that the many and varied bike, walk and roll related organizations in Winnipeg are used to getting their hands dirty using a combination of elbow grease, innovation and learning from community to continue delivering programs and events the city needs.

Winnipeg’s not-for-profit bike organizations have also responded to community needs again during the COVID-19 pandemic.

With programming impacted by the pandemic, used kids’ bikes began piling up at the 4R Depot. The WRENCH improvised by hosting an outdoor bike-building weekend in September.

Volunteers repaired more than 150 bikes on site.

Other organizations have also been trying to provide for communities in the face of the pandemic.

Throughout the summer, Winnipeg Trails worked to push the City of Winnipeg to open more roads and keep them open to biking, walking and rolling, while limiting car access to those streets.

Through the Healing Rover project, they worked to connect parts of Winnipeg’s walk and bike network to provide better infrastructure. The Healing Rover project is part of a larger Healing Trails program, which aims to provide opportunities to honour Indigenous languages and cultures, while incorporating useful wayfinding signage and traffic calming planters.

Healing Trails can see medicine walks, dancing for healing, pipe ceremonies, walking for justice, and sometimes bingo, happening on Winnipeg Trails. They stem from Indigenous people not having their human rights upheld.

“By healing that spirit and that space, hopefully we are helping that energy flow better,” says Janell Henry, project manager with Healing Trails.

“From years of racism people don’t feel comfortable walking in the city, so how do we make them feel comfortable? Maybe it’s the smell of medicines or their language being out in the landscape.”

Healing Trails is developing a framework including ideas and methodologies for including Indigenous consultation throughout projects in the city, Henry says, ensuring that spiritual, emotional, physical and mental-health aspects are considered in a trauma-informed approach to design.

School Loops is another Winnipeg Trails pandemic innovation, which promotes safe routes connecting neighbourhood schools.

Green Action Centre and others have also worked to promote an aligned program called Active and Safe Routes to Schools.

It is even more important than ever that children and families have access to safe, fun, ways to walk and bike to school.

The School Loops project describes itself as “equal parts pure joy and serious response to transportation-related crises stemming from infrastructure issues and a global pandemic.” That joy is found in the signs with each loop given its own colour and animal mascot. Or perhaps joy is found as kids create footprints in freshly fallen snow, learn about neighbourhood connections between schoolyard playgrounds, or take the time while walking the loop to step in crunchy frozen puddles.

If City of Winnipeg planners are looking carefully, they will be able to see, along these loops, opportunities for traffic-calmed streets, better intersections and design focused on keeping us all safe.

This year’s fundraiser Cycle of Giving/Moving on Up has similarly adjusted to be COVID-19 safe. Rather than coming together at Orioles, more than two dozen volunteers and businesses have taken it upon themselves to build bikes on their home bike stands, and in their shops. We anticipate that, like in yeas past, this collective work will result in hundreds of donated bikes by Dec. 5, just in time for the holidays.

There is simple joy in cycling and many of us in this movement know that. While we may be acting on broader concerns of climate change, city infrastructure efficiency, and equitable communities, the fact remains that riding a bike is a lot of fun.

Eventually, the pandemic won’t be the top-of-mind issue, but Winnipeggers will still be working to make the city work for more people.

The WRENCH will be celebrating the history of Bike Activism in Winnipeg on its social media platforms in the days leading up to Dec. 5. You can contribute to Cycle of Giving/Moving on Up by visiting thewrench.ca

Anna Weier is a longtime Winnipeg cyclist and volunteer.