- Our purpose is to connect people with free and low-cost bicycles and the tools and knowledge for their repair. We are building a shop where bikes are tools for economic, racial, and environmental justice.
- We are a group of mechanics, artists, and organizers who came together in Fall 2020 with the dream of creating a community bicycle workshop run by people doing the work. We wanted to create an organization where people like many of us, who are often left out of mainstream bike and mechanics/hands-on spaces - Black, Indigenous, & People of Color (BIPOC), working class people, queer and trans folks, women - belong.
- In Spring 2021, we launched as Providence Bicycle Collective, a 501(c)(3) non-profit with a mission to connect people in Providence with free and low-cost bicycles and the tools and knowledge for their repair. In our first season, we refurbished and redistributed dozens of bikes, prioritizing giving away bikes to people who use them as basic, essential transportation. We also held educational workshops based on principles of popular education - “everyone has something to teach, everyone has something to learn" - and held open repair hours where people could learn to fix their own bikes with the help of experienced mechanics. We are a worker-run, democratically-operated non-profit organization.
- Moving forward, we only plan to expand our work in redistribution, eduction, and repair.