Volunteer-powered · Youngstown, Ohio
Your hands earn your wheels. We'll show you where to start — no experience, no tools, no problem. Bring a few hours to the shop and leave with something you built.
Earn-a-Bike · the bargain
Earn-a-Bike is the co-op's trade: you put in volunteer hours, and a refurbished bike becomes yours. Every session is a row on your card, and every row you finish gets punched. Come as you are — the shop is full of people learning out loud.
Come to an open shop session and tell a volunteer you're working toward a bike. Someone will hand you a card, point you at the parts room, and get you started.
Sort donated parts, strip a frame down to bare metal, clean chains, true a wheel. Every job on the floor counts the same on the card, and nobody expects you to know the difference yet.
At the end of each session a volunteer punches your card, so you can always see how far you've come. The card lives at the shop — you don't have to keep track of anything.
When the card is full, pick out a refurbished bike that fits you and take it home. If the first one isn't right, keep looking — there's a floor full of them.
The board
Everything here arrived as a donation and came back to life in this room. Volunteers strip it down, replace what's worn, and put it back together before it ever reaches the floor.
What's ready changes week to week. The board inside the shop has the latest list.
New cables and pads where they're needed, bearings cleaned and packed, wheels trued, and a test ride around the block before it goes out the door.
Everything here is donated, refurbished by volunteers, and sold to keep the shop running and the doors open.
Youth bike safety classes
Riding is the easy part. The class is about everything around it — helmets that actually fit, signals drivers understand, and the confidence to handle a busy street without panicking.
Straight, snug and two fingers above the eyebrow. We adjust every helmet before anyone rolls out.
Where to ride in the lane, how to signal a turn, and how to make eye contact with drivers.
Practice on a closed course until a shoulder check and a clean stop feel like second nature.
Following distance, calling out hazards, and staying together on a neighborhood loop.
Open shop
Open shop is the co-op at its most useful: repair stands, donated parts, and people who know how a bottom bracket is supposed to feel. Bring a bike that needs work — or bring one you're finished with.
Pull your bike up to a stand and work on it with tools you don't own and advice you don't have to pay for. Volunteers are on the floor to help when you get stuck.
Bins of handlebars, cranks, pedals, saddles and racks, pulled off donated bikes. If it's on the shelf, it's fair game for your build.
Outgrown it, or never ride it? Leave it with us. It'll either be refurbished for the floor or become the parts that keep another bike rolling.
Turn the card over
Refurbished bikes, used parts, a stand with your name on it, and a room full of people who'd rather be working on bicycles. That's the whole co-op — and there's always room for one more pair of hands.