Rethinking Lifestyle

Great news! Your chance to help start the first Community Bike Repair shop in Southeast Manitoba has arrived!

We’ve been offered a section of the old La Broquerie Lumber store to use as our space, and we’re excited to finally make our vision a reality. If you haven’t heard, we’ve been looking for space to establish a community bike shop for a long time. This would be modelled after the Winnipeg Repair Education and Recycling Hub. The W.R.E.N.C.H. is a wonderfully successful bicycle repair organization in Winnipeg that offers free bicycles and repair instruction to the public in exchange for volunteer hours. Its goal is to get more bikes on the road and to provide owners with hands-on experience in repairing and maintaining their own bikes. In addition to that, we hope to create a local community where cyclists can get together to do what we love most – talk, learn, and experience the joy and elegant efficiency of cycling.

That’s where you come in! Transforming this old lumber store into a buzzing, welcoming and well-equipped bicycle shop will take some creativity and cooperation. We need to clear out the existing space, and build bicycle repair stations, as well as storage for bikes and parts. We’ve got to get the word out that we’re accepting donations of old bikes, then collect, sort and start working on them. We’ll need a community of volunteers like yourself who are interested in improving and sharing their own bicycle repair skills and – more importantly – working with other people who want to do the same. We’ll be fund-raising, too: Selling bikes that we repair and applying for grants (and maybe a few other projects that we have in mind), oh yeah – and we need a name!

This new space is ideal, and we can rely on the amazing support of our friends at the W.R.E.N.C.H. to help us get started, so our success is looking good. If this sounds like your kind of project, or one that would interest someone you know, please contact Wade Wiebe at se.mb.bike@gmail.com.