This Friday, Vancouver’s Our Community Bikes celebrates 25 years of building bikes and building community with its anniversary Big Spanky Do — a night of live DJ’s, dancing, games, prizes, drinks, live performances and cool bike stuff!
Friday, September 7 – 8:00pm
Red Gate Arts Society
1965 Main Street
$15 – $25
Get tickets here.
All proceeds go to support Pedals for the People, an OCB program improving access to complete bicycles, parts, accessories and service for those who experience barriers to affordable forms of transportation.
OCB opened in 1993 as a project of Better Environmentally Sound Transportation (BEST), which subsequently created Pedal Society to manage OCB as a stand-alone non-profit to operate OCB and other programs.
“We started OCB as a Do-It-Yourself bicycle repair and education space – in order to offer affordable bike maintenance, used bike sales and related services. From the beginning the culture of OCB has been to empower people to repair their bicycles, get more bikes on the street by refurbishing bicycles and taking bikes out of the waste stream” said Gavin Davidson, a founding director.
“Over the years we have seen an increased need to make bikes available to low income and marginalized individuals. We created the Pedals for the People program in order to give bikes to people in need” said Jesse Cooper, senior mechanic. “Volunteers from the community help repair bikes and then we are able to give them away for free. Bike repair is an amazing way to bring people together – women, youth, people with all skill levels can pick up a wrench and learn how to fix a bike.”
Can’t make it to Friday’s ‘Do? Make a charitable donation to the PEDAL Foundation.