Bike Library at Bike!Bike! Tijuana 2019

Bike!Bike!: an international, annual gathering organized by and for community bicycle projects. The conference is a space for participants from shops and related advocacy groups to converge in a different city each year over a 4 day period to have workshops and strengthen our social network.
Volunteer Mechanic Lexi Janezic and myself traveled to Tijuana, Mexico to represent the Iowa City Bike Library this past October. Bike!Bike! is a one-of-a-kind experience open to anyone who wishes to connect with community bike shop folks who believe that the bicycle is a vehicle for revolution. Lexi and I wanted to share a few highlights from our trip; primarily with ICBL volunteers, but also for anyone thinking about attending next year in Mexico City. 

• This year Bike! Bike! focused on language justice, which is the principle that people should get to communicate in the language that they feel most comfortable with. We think this could be applied at the Bike Library in our shop and classes. How cool would it be if we could offer classes in Arabic and Spanish? At the very least we feel inspired more than ever to create labels for parts/tools in Spanish/English the next time we update the shop (which could happen in the next year). 
• What part is/will the Bike Library play in gentrification? How can we be cognizant as an organization in mitigating this, as it is something that directly affects the community we are trying to serve. 
• We were impressed with how organized the Bike Library is compared to other community shops. Thank you volunteers! 
• We feel really good about where we are at in terms of what the Bike Library has been able to offer to the community: Women Empowerment Ride (WERide), Rent-a-Bench, Farm Cycle, Women Trans Femme Night; all with having one paid employee and a core group of solid volunteers. After speaking with folks at the conference who are paid staff at their shops, it is clear that in order to expand programming we need to consider hiring more staff to organize volunteers and programming, which can be a significant sticking point for growth.  
• Bike! Bike! is such an inclusive environment! We feel it is important for at least a couple volunteers to go every year, regardless of their experience level with bikes. 
• Visiting and talking with members of similar organizations expanded our idea of what the Bike Library can be! We gained so many new ideas about how other community bike shop operate.
• How can we do better with volunteer retention? Ideas: Mechanics and Shop Leads are clearly distinguished perhaps with different aprons. Ask volunteers for their skills self assessment and what they hope to gain from volunteering. Teach people how to be better at teaching. 
• Make sure volunteer tasks are identifiable and doable. Divide them up into small, medium and large tasks. 
• Teach people how to teach. Yes, this was just mentioned, but it is so important. We’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of ways we can better share knowledge and become better teachers to each other and our patrons. One thing we’ve done in the last year to was develop a Hands Off Assisting Approach. We can learn a lot from taking the time to pause and hunt for the right words to explain something as opposed to doing work and saying something along the lines of, “and then just take this tool, and tighten that down, and then it’s fixed.” However, there are more things we can do to empower our volunteers to communicate most effectively. 
• We would like to continue to develop youth bike initiatives with member cards and prizes. 
• More art. If we are serious about making art a central component of our organizations culture then we should hire an Art Director. 
• Something that we have identified as a sticking point and would like to find a solution for is scheduling time for volunteers to practice skills outside of regular retail hours. It is hard to grow mechanic skills and manage answering questions that patrons have. This will require getting more volunteers to cover the increase in shop hours whether we are open to the public or not. 

Audrey Wiedemeier

Audrey is the Executive Director at the Iowa City Bike Library and has been looking forward to attending B!B! for the last eight years. It did not disappoint!