The Volunteer Pathways program was created by volunteers for volunteers. This series focuses on building a mechanical skill set, teaching abilities, leadership abilities, and overall knowledge of BBP. Together, we’ll also be building ambassadors of our mission who can share the BBP experience with others.

The best learning opportunities happen when you have a tool in your hand and an educated person by your side to guide you through that process. Part of BBP’s Mission is to provide an educational work space in a diverse and non-threatening environment. Insert Volunteer Pathways.

Bike shops can be intimidating — lots of weird tools and parts; and at first glance, it appears everyone else knows more than you do (they don’t).

These classes focus on a hands-on experience with educational components centered on the following: correct tool usage, processes, and an introduction to the BBP Experience. We want to provide insight on what we do here and why. We want to build educated volunteers who feel good about the service they provide and feel as though they’ve learned a thing or two! The more knowledgeable people we have, the more teachers we have, and the better experience we have for all of our volunteers as a whole.

It is our goal to create a fun, interactive, and informative class based around four separate certifications: Take-a-part, Wheels, Kids Bikes, and later, Adult Bikes.

Please note that if you sign up for one of that Pathways classes, there are certain required commitments. Although we would love to offer this type of educational opportunity to each person every single volunteer night, with the nature of Volunteer Nights and the high number of people attending, we just aren’t able to do that. By setting aside Tuesdays to invest into you, we ask for a commitment to BBP in the form of Thursday Volunteer Nights. Please see below for guidelines.

Volunteer Pathway Guidelines and Requirements:

FULL Class-series attendance: the SAME group of participants for the entire series; each class builds off of skills learned the previous class
Commit to attend (at minimum) 12 hours of Thursday Volunteer Nights/Open Hour Volunteer shifts in a 3-month span after completion
Complete all certification requirements (i.e. complete a designated number of bikes/wheels/etc.)
Have fun! All we ask for is for you to share your freshly gained knowledge with us at the shop!

Benefits and Perks for gaining this AWESOME certification:

Own personal name tag with certification signifiers. Woo!
$25 Gift Certificate for used parts purchases
Volunteer Night signup priorities
Open Hours Volunteer Hour signup priorities
Become an invaluable resource to BBP!

TAKE-A-PART CERTIFICATION

Ever wonder what happens to a bicycle when it is donated to BBP? Insert our take-a-part certification. When bikes come in that are a little worse for wear and require a too much for our mechanics to build back up, we pull all usable parts and recycle the rest. Those reusable parts then go onto other bikes we build up and resell OR go to our parts room to be resold. All of which helps us continue to fund our programs and services to the community. This 3-class series will go over in detail what we save, why we save it, and how to pull it off of the bike. We will cover tools and techniques to use, shop layout, and other processes that help keep things running smoothly.

Sign up here!