April 2026

Working Bikes Community, May is National Bike Month and we are ready! We have been busy pushing pedals down, and also out, in, and all around Working Bikes, celebrating two wheeled transportation as we do every month -- we're delighted when the rest of the country joins in. We primed the warehouse with SEVEN collection events just last Saturday, bringing in hundreds of bikes. To make an already busy post-Earth Day weekend even more exciting, we also had our Dia del Niño event with our friends in Marshall Square on April 25th, bringing out the community with bikes, pinatas, and lots of fun!!

Staff and volunteers made room in the warehouse for all the incoming rides by packing up 548 bikes in a container now bound for the Bwindi Women’s Bike shop, where the mechanics have increased their sales territory and were anxious for a resupply. You can read more about that below. Some days to look out for this coming month are May 3rd, which is Ride Your Bike Day, May 11 - 17th which is Ride Your Bike to Work week, and May 11th - June 7th for the 2026 Bike Commuter Challenge!

We also want to invite our community to Brandon’s Bike Shop Rededication on May 8th from 4-6pm. We will be joined by Brandon’s parents Joe and Carol Bernier, you can read more about this event here. And for fans of bike shops and shipping containers who don't want to visit 2434 S. Western or Bwindi, Uganda, this spring, we're excited to announce that North Lawndale's own Bike Box, the YMEN/WB bike shop in a shipping container at 13th and Pulaski, will be opening back up for the summer on May 13th with a party starting at 12pm, ending at 2:30pm.

Día del Niño with MSRN & TCEP

We are always honored to put bikes to use, and devote our cycling positive energy, in our immediate community. And we are deeply grateful to the Marshall Square Resource Network and Latinos Progresando for making that honor possible the last few years through their micro-grant program. We like to kick off the nice riding season with our first community ride just a half mile away at Maria Saucedo / Telpochcalli Elementary school, where the parking lot cleared of cars gives us plenty of space to have fun on bikes.

This year, we partnered with the Ollin Youth of the Telpochcalli Community Education Project on the event planning and brought out other community groups for a celebration of safe cycling in the neighborhood. We hosted a community ride to highlight Little Village and North Lawndale cycling infrastructure (we love our protected bike lanes!), SAFE Ambassadors helped a dozen of our neighbors learn to ride on bikes refurbished by Working Bikes volunteers, we donated 12 bikes to TCEP youth, and WB staff and volunteers performed bicycle safety checks for all the adults and kids who brought their own bikes. We also raffled off 3 great bikes to the community! And of course, just like last year, the pinata was a "hit."

We get a lot of questions about our shipping containers.

Q: How long does a shipment take? ​
A: 2-3 months usually
​Q: How many bikes can you fit in a container? ​
A: We manage around 550 each time, but are always up for setting new records!
​Q:How long does it take to pack a container?
​ It usually takes 2-3 days of packing, but we have done it 1 day (not advisable)

But there is one question that has a pretty interesting answer. What happens to a shipping container once it gets there? A lot of the shipping containers we use are reused over and over again by shipping lines, taking goods all over the world. But in the case of the containers we send through A&K Philanthropy, they are given a new life just like the bicycles! Because the A&K containers are bought outright, the recipients are able to keep the containers and create new structures with them. The Bwindi Women’s Bike Shop in Uganda was built from 2 shipping containers creating a place for them to work and store bikes and Africycle did something similar in Malawi. Perhaps the most surprising is the one that serves as a very secure Pharmacy in Bwindi.

Earth Day Week means collection events at Working Bikes, and this month was busy for our Collection Crew! We had 7 events on Saturday all over Chicagoland, bringing in lots of bikes that will be packed onto our next shipment to CESTA in El Salvador!

Alongside all the pickups we have a new pilot program: Bike Delivery! Charlie completed our first trial webstore bicycle delivery to Warrenville last week, and we are rolling out the pilot service to everybody this week. For a $200 donation after the purchase of a webstore bike, a Working Bikes volunteer will bring the bike to you in the following counties: Cook County, DuPage County and Lake County. One of our volunteers will reach out to schedule a time within 2 weeks of ordering for a delivery date. If you think you are in an area we frequent outside of those counties, please feel free to reach out to us at donations@workingbikes.org and if you have questions about a specific bike please email sales@workingbikes.org.