Winter is in full swing and the first year of Newmarket Cycles programming is behind us. We learned a lot as we began to embed ourselves in the local community, and met a ton of new friends along the way. We are grateful to every program participant and volunteer who joined us at our events, and can’t wait for an even bigger and better season in 2023.
Let’s look at the fun we got up to in 2022:
We hosted a series of DIY Bike Repair events that had participants bring their bikes and learn how to work on them. During the 25 DIY Bike Repair events we fixed 58 bicycles for 62 participants.
During the DIY Bike Repair events we allowed library card holders to borrow a nice, new bike from our Bicycle Lending Library. In the 25 Bicycle Lending Days we lent 30 bicycles. Participants could also use one of these bikes to join our group rides!
Pop-Up Bike Booths are like DIY Bike Repair days but hosted in a remote location like the farmers market or public library. During the 9 Pop-Ups we repaired 48 bikes for 24 participants. We also had a lot of inquisitive visitors who wanted to learn more about Newmarket Cycles!
The biggest reason for having a bike is to ride it, which is why we hosted a series of Group Rides. We led over 130 participants during our 36 Group Rides through town.
Our volunteers have been a great help in setting up our new bike hub and fixing bikes. 21 volunteers signed up to help us and completed 42 shifts with a total of 109 volunteer hours. We can’t thank them enough for their support.
We got to share our cycling knowledge with the community during workshops that were hosted in partnership with the Newmarket Public Library and Newmarket Seniors Meeting Place. 31 attendees came out to our 4 workshops. We’re so grateful for the continuing support from our workshop hosts.
One of our initiatives involves diverting discarded bikes from landfills to make them roadworthy again before giving them to those in need. We have already rescued over 1874 lbs of bicycles and are working with our great volunteers to get them ready for our future Bike Rescue program.
The snow hasn’t stopped us from running some winter programming but we’re still looking forward to the warm weather of spring and summer when we can be at full capacity again. Here’s to 2023!