It’s a bit hard to believe that another year has come and gone, but 2024 is here. 2023 was another tremendously productive year for BikeX, and it was a big team effort. We extend a heartfelt THANK YOU to all of our volunteers, donors, partners, and champions for your support to continue teaching the art of bicycle repair, reduce the waste stream, and provide meaningful transportation to folks in our community.
2023 by the numbers
- 884 bikes donated (including 222 as-is donations)
- 400+ bikes repaired off-site
- 342 locks,150 helmets, and 131 light sets donated
- 161 homework projects completed
- 645 bikes sold
- 133 events
- ~600 volunteers contributed a total of >11,000 volunteer hours
- $100,000 raised for the BikeX Building Fund
When 2023 began, we set out to donate slightly fewer bikes, but increased our impact with more off-site repairs and events. Through continued partnerships with the Silicon Valley Kids Triathlon, Gunn High School, Palo Alto High School, Hope’s Corner, and others, BikeX volunteers and staff repaired over 400 bikes at events throughout the community in 2023. We plan to continue these events and add more in 2024.
As many of our beloved local bike shops closed over the last few years, so went many events we cherished such as the Cupertino Bike Swap. After many requests, Andrew, our ED, spearheaded the effort to hold the first bike swap in our parking lot. The results were quite successful: we collected $16k in revenue, had more interest from vendors than we could accommodate, and generated some new excitement and name recognition in the bike community.
You made this happen!
Volunteers logged over 11,000 hours last year. Here is a list of those of you who entered more than 20 hours in our online form:
Lucy Hsu
Dave Fork
Jack Miller
Michael Khaw
Samuel Spal
Judy Colwell
Taghi Saadati
Roger Conley Smith
Helen Hsiu
Mark Lentfer
John Langbein
Pete Letchworth
David Geraghty
Bert Nelson
Raghavendra Rao Loka
Girard Chandler
Rob Matusiak
Sue Lentfer
Etienne Grossmann
Mary Kelly
John Griffin
Colin Moy
Tom Feledy
Rob Kleinschmidt
Darren Lin
Carol Mattsson
Peter Hansell
Jay Rosser
Ray Collier
Kevin Wang
Ashlyn Roeder
David Kamp
Gunter Steinbach
Fernando Pacheco
Johnnie Tom
David Kautz
Pavlo Tkach
Dave Erskine
Brennan Pang
Colleen DeLizza
Ke Wu
Steve Blair
Luke Zhou
Chris Jasper
Grant Grundler
Zane Watson
Jim Lentfer
Jeffrey Chen
Dov Shiffman
Jerry Torres
Robert Neff
Lauren Zuravleff
Cary Bishop
Nils Giffon
Teddy Torres
Ethan Casale
Andrey Petrov
Rohit Sengupta
Ryan Wang
Bryden Lao
Ralph Lao
Misha Silin
Evan Lojewski
Logan Lao
Julian Detering
Dan McGInley
Rose Mesterhazy
Sava Iliev
Peter-John (PJ) King
James Casab
James Seto
Gabe Kronstadt
Aaron Kronstadt
Looking Ahead
We have big plans in 2024 to expand and improve our operations, programs and impact. We appreciate that many of you have shared your ideas about where we’re heading, and we’ve listened.
Our amazing volunteers are our most valuable asset. First and foremost, we aim to improve the volunteer experience and make volunteering at BikeX better than ever in 2024! We are targeting a 25% volunteer growth, both in total hours volunteered and number of repeat volunteers. To improve the volunteer experience we are working on:
- Upgrades to volunteer outreach and follow-ups, especially new ones.
- Provide everyone with a better organized shop that realizes some of the improvements requested by volunteers last year.
- Extend Eventbrite invitations to more first time volunteers.
- Free or subsidized lunch at Saturday events.
- Expand evening repair events during the week.
- Provide more shop hours with opportunities to volunteer.
- Resume formal Open Shop events for volunteers.
- Better tracking and follow-up for our 5x volunteer swag recognition.
- Better recognition and tracking of volunteer advancement from newbie to independent to mentor to QA.
Second, we seek to improve our operations. Improving the operational efficiency of BikeX directly increases our impact. We aim to make fixing bikes easier and expand our programming in the community. Here are some of the ways we plan to improve our operations:
- Track repaired and as-is donated bikes separately, with the goal of donating 800 fully repaired bicycles.
- Perform bike repairs and provide instruction in the community, including bilingual repair instruction and safety classes.
- Update our mission statement to more accurately reflect our core goals.
- Improve our warehousing and inventory control functions.
- Employ a human resources contractor to ensure compliance of our workplace, operations, and governance.
- Measure and track more operational data more frequently.
Third, we will seek to increase our revenue so that we can afford to do more and better things.
2023 was a record year for BikeX in number of bikes sold: 645. Andrew and Gregg, our remarkable staff, relied on more paid mechanic time this year than ever before to repair the higher-end bikes donated to BikeX. We have worked to free volunteers from working on blue-tag bikes and other revenue-generating activities, and plan to continue separating the volunteering experience from revenue activities. With increased revenues, we can increase our impact with added programs and more bike donations, and invest in our volunteer experiences. We are hopeful that 2024 is another big year!
Keep on pedaling, keep on wrenching!