Thousands of bikes line the basement warehouse at Working Bikes in Little Village.
Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times
“They had their hands full,” Ravenscroft said. He remembers thinking, “We’re going to have to do this on our own.”
Ravenscroft collected the first bikes at scrapyards around Chicago. He would show up before dawn once a week and buy all of their bicycles for $5 each.
“I started collecting bikes and putting them on any vehicle headed south to Central America,” he said.
He partnered with a group, Pastors for Peace, and gave them bikes to put on their caravans.
The group sent their first shipment of 400 bikes to Nicaragua, Little said.
The operation kept growing as Working Bikes partnered with bicycle shops that supplied them with broken bicycles.
“Pretty soon we had a basement full of bicycles,” Little said. The couple moved the bikes to a garage, then a six-flat she owned in Pilsen. After moving around to larger and larger places, Working Bikes settled in a building at 2434 S. Western Ave., where it remains today.
Still growing
The business quickly grew from a “seat-of-your-pants” operation, as Little put it, where everyone volunteered, to a larger nonprofit with paid employees. The nonprofit matured when it hired an executive director to manage day-to-day operations, Little said.
Clarke has filled that role for a few years. He helps oversee the volunteer program and Working Bikes shop, where the group sells refurbished bicycles to help fund their shipping program. Those bikes sell for an average of $275, Clarke said.
Bikes that aren’t shipped to other countries or sold in the shop are donated to local groups that get them to needy people in the Chicago area.
Working Bikes also has creative ways of getting them into the community. It recently donated 50 children’s bikes to be raffled for the Chicago bookstore Open Books’ summer reading program, Clarke said.
Working Bikes owns the building it operates from in Little Village. Little said Chicago’s relative affordability, compared with other large American cities, helped the nonprofit grow while similar groups struggled with increasing rent in other cities.
“Chicago is a special place because of that,” she said.
Dozens of bikes are lined up for sale at Working Bikes in Little Village.
Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times
The group sometimes runs into red tape and other unwritten rules while trying to ship the bikes internationally. Working Bikes shipped its first bikes to Mexico this year, Clarke said. It took time to find a workaround for the excessive tariff on bikes, Clarke said.
Meanwhile, other organizations have taken up the same mission as Working Bikes.
The city of Chicago began a program two years ago, called Chicago Bikes, to give away 5,000 bikes to needy Chicagoans by 2026. Clarke said Working Bikes was involved with the city from the beginning of that program. It helped the city choose which bicycles to buy for the program, he said.
Gorman, the group’s board president, said it’s wonderful the city is helping distribute free bikes.
“This is not a competition. We are mission-driven. Our missions overlap completely,” he said.
Aaron Brown has worked at Working Bikes for 20 years.
Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times
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