October 2026

Happy Spooky season! Earlier this month we celebrated our 27th Anniversary and raised $116,700 while having a great time! After our annual party, we wind down from the busy storefront season, get caught up on adult Cycle of Power donations, and focus on kids bikes for holiday donations. But we still have some containers to pack! We filled a container with 503 bikes just last week, those are heading to our friends CESTA in El Salvador now (after a rocky start getting to port). We knew exactly what they needed because Operations Associate Misa visited in September. He wrote a bit on his experience for this newsletter which you can find below. We'd be remiss if we didn't send a big thank you to our partner Bikes for the World who facilitate shipments to CESTA and some other partners (and have the bruises and headaches to show for it).

Locally, there are still some great rides coming up, including Southwest Side Dia de los Muertos Bike Ride with our friends the Gage Park Cyclists. They will be riding to a the Ghost Bikes on the Southwest Side and will bring candles and marigolds to honor the riders we lost too soon. We will also be joining Little Village Environmental Justice Organization for its first Ofrendas In Motion bike ride starting at 10 am and going until noon November 1st. Cyclists can create their "bike-ofrendas" and then start a 2 mile family friendly ride taking off at La Villita Farm, 2800 S. Sacramento St., and continuing on 26th Street from Sacramento Avenue to Manuel Perez Jr. Plaza, 4345 W. 26th St.

Thank you for 27 Years

Thank you all who came and celebrated our 27th Anniversary!

We raised $116,700 dollars to support our mission, breaking our previous fundraising record!

​We want to thank our caterers Flor Azteca for the delicious food, Chaos Brew Club and Revolution Brewing for their tasty brews, Think Outside Da Block for their custom Working Bikes snacks, Ignotz Ristorante for dessert, Designs4Dignity for lending their tables and Pastor Reshorna and Stone Temple Baptist Church for bringing the great sound system (and more tables)! We also want to shout out the planning committee, led by WB Board Secretary Claire, the inimitable Ed Hanlon for his vision and elbow grease to improve our space, and Finn and Luna for taking the lead coordinating on the staff side, and of course the army of volunteers who came through and helped run the party; it could not have happened without you! ​

We also want to shout out our Olympic, Paramount and Superior sponsors:

Joe & Melanie Balzer

Amy Little & Lee Ravenscroft

Phil Kaplan & Marcia Bogolub

Joe & Carol Bernier Christopher Rudmose
​
Christopher B. Burke Engineering, Ltd.

Floyd the Dog

Rachel Duckett

We have kept rolling for 27 years thanks to our community, our volunteers, staff, sponsors and every bike donor. We are always so honored to invite everyone into our building and see how we find new homes for thousands of bikes every year. This celebration is our one fundraiser of the year, but we are accepting donations all year long!

Our partner Karim and his crew at the Village Bicycle Project in Sierra Leone have been busy! In just 3 weeks they were able to distribute 300 bicycles to students who had to make the 8 mile trek to school by foot. Now these students have a quick, reliable way to get to school and run errands for their family. Another 60 bikes were given to teachers, farmers and community health workers.

In the case studies of bike recipients, students talk about being able to spend more time on school work, getting to school on time, reducing the cost of transportation for their families and just how happy and good they feel to have a bike! Add to that the increased safety (especially for female students), improved attendance rates, and better academic outcomes shown in research on the impact of bikes on education and one can't help but want to put every student in Salone on a saddle. Thanks to our friends at Schools for Salone and our partners Bikes for the World and Re-Cycle, along with the bike donors and supporters in Chicago that fuel Working Bikes, 5,000 young people in Sierra Leone will be pedaling to their classrooms.

VBP has also established a new bicycle library with 20 bicycles at Bo Amadiyah Secondary School. It will allow students who travel long distances to borrow a bicycle to get to school and support their families. They hope that this access will reduce their commuting burden and help them improve their academic performance.

We will be packing a container heading to Sierra Leone early next week, we are so proud to continue supporting such great organizations making a difference in people's lives with reliable transportation. And as an added ingredient for this container, we'll be including some racing gear contributed by professional cyclists who connected with Ibrahim Kamara to support his team and plenty of kit thanks to our friend Lon and PAC Tour Cycling for the Lunsar Cycling Team and other budding racers in Salone.

Working Bikes is proud to be housed in the Southwest side of Chicago and grateful to our community partners in this part of the city who bring folks together on two wheels to make the neighborhood better for everyone. This weekend, some of our friends will be hosting rides in the Gage Park and Little Village communities that will be fun and meaningful, highlighting the role for safe cycling infrastructure. We want to send huge props to Gage Park Cyclists, Southwest Collective, and Little Village Environmental Justice Organization for their work to engage community and getting folks rolling. The good people at Block Club Chicago had a nice write up on the rides and broader issue of safe cycling on the Southwest Side. We couldn't have said it better ourselves! It's nice to see this end-of-season safety focus, following the WB/TCEP Dia del Niño Safe Infrastructure in Marshall Square Ride to start the season and the series of rides the Taildraggers and Gage Park Cyclists held to support bike lanes down Archer through the summer. Stay safe out there, everyone, and give us a heads up if you can join this weekend!

We're also excited about the potential of infrastructure improvements on old BNSF tracks in Pilsen and Little Village to get more folks safely riding in our neighborhood. The Department of Transportation is hosting a final public meeting on the possibilities just a few blocks from WB and make your voice heard Tuesday, November 17, 2026 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. at the Rauner Family YMCA 2700 S Western Avenue, Chicago, IL 60608, just down the street from Working Bikes.

For more info on the meeting you can click here and check out the map of areas under consideration below.