Recyke y'bike are on the move! We've had to move out of our main workshop at short notice and we need your help to get our new home up and running.
At Recyke y'bike we're passionate about getting more people onto bikes. Lots of people share our passion and we've grown very quickly in a few short years. We need your help now to create efficient, sustainable ways of working in our new (much bigger) home so that we can keep recycling bikes and helping people for many years to come.
We need to make physical improvements to our new Brinkburn Street site to make it energy efficient and transform it into a pleasant and comfortable environment for staff, volunteers and customers. We need to invest in our team; providing training and development opportunities for staff and volunteers that will enable us to develop our work in the community. We're desperate for modern tills so that we can manage our stock effectively and free up staff time to focus on refurbishing bikes. Supporting us now will enable us to self-generate income much more effectively, ensuring the long-term viability of Recyke y'bike.
We believe that bikes are a great way to address a range of social issues (transport poverty, obesity, mental health, unemployment) as well as being really fun! Bikes are environmentally friendly (even more so when refurbished and reused), brilliant for health and well-being and cheap to get about on. The basic engineering skills needed to fix a bike can be transferred to other settings and the satisfaction that comes from fixing something broken to bring it back to life is empowering. Volunteering provides opportunities for people at risk of social isolation to work within a team whilst learning new skills and gaining qualifications.
We've been refurbishing bikes since 2006 with thousands of bikes passing through our doors each year. Bikes are either sold to cover running costs (the average sale price is £114), given away to local people or local partner organisations or shipped to projects in Africa.
Volunteers are the life blood of Recyke y'bike. Volunteers enable us to process hundreds of donated bikes each month as well as providing guidance to customers in our shops, helping with events, transporting our bikes between locations and spreading the good word about Recyke y'bike! Volunteering is a great way to meet new people, contribute to a shared goal, learn new skills and gain accredited qualifications.
It's not only volunteers who can access training and qualifications; we also offer training to school groups, community organisations, cycling clubs and even pop up in parks and on street corners to fix bikes and show people how to make repairs.
For a couple of years we've been looking for a new home for our Newcastle headquarters. We've been squeezed into railway arches at the top of the Ouseburn since the beginning, but need more space and better working conditions for the team. The crunch came when urgent repairs were needed to the workshop arch to make it safe and we were give two weeks to vacate. Luckily we'd found our new home at 164 Brinkburn Street just in time and we're now in the process of moving in. It's currently a big, open plan space. It's lovely and light but very cold! We need help to build some partitions to divide up the shop, workshop and office spaces as well as create storage for all of our bike bits and working areas which can be heated!
Being located in the heart of Byker creates exciting opportunities to work much more closely with the community and we've got loads of ideas for employability and well-being projects. To deliver these projects effectively we need help to invest in the training of staff and volunteers so that they have the skills and confidence to engage with people who are isolated and at risk.
The wonderful people of the North East have been incredibly generous to Recyke y'bike over the past 13 years, donating thousands of volunteer hours and thousands of bikes. At this pivotal point in Recyke y'bike's development we need your help even more so that we can continue to grow and develop, meet demand and connect more people to the joy and freedom that comes with a bike.