Hello everyone,
I don’t think I can review everything we’ve done in 2011 because that is more than will keep your attention. However, I’ve been tracking some programming data from the past year that I would love to share with folks. This year we’ve gotten geeky over graphs and I know there are those of you out there that love this stuff as well.
Before we get into the fun stuff though, let me share that after painting our Retail Service Center, painting Back Alley Bikes, building new work stands in Back Alley Bikes and fixing the bathroom downstairs we are still moving. In 2012 we are going to remodel the bathroom in Back Alley Bikes. Just because it is winter doesn’t mean we have slowed down. We appreciate all the donations you have given us this year and we hope you can continue your generosity into 2012 as we continue to get better and better at what we do. Here is some proof:
Adult Education: Every month we have volunteer orientations for adults to learn about volunteer opportunities here at the Hub. Many folks come to the orientations just to learn about what we do and end up not volunteering which is fine. Everyone gets to learn about how or shop runs and gets a short lesson on bike specific tools.
Every Sunday we have Mechanic Classes for adults to learn the basics of bike repair. This happens year round with the orientations and classes advertising each other with volunteers and students often.
The light green line is the number of folks coming to orientations and mechanic classes each month. The dark green bars are the hours folks worked in the classes each month (usually two hours per class).
In 2011 we averaged 38 adults a month learning about The Hub and bike repair year round. November and December are smaller due to Sundays being cancelled due to the Holidays. Hopefully next Summer (May-Sept) we will be able to offer additional Adult Mechanic Class since that is our peak time.
Volunteer Data: Year round we have volunteers help sort bike parts, build bikes for kids, assist with our Youth Earn-a-Bike classes, strip bikes and help maintain our warehouse space. Without volunteers, this place would be a mess.
This year, due to volunteer request, we were able to increase the hours of “volunteer nights” from 2 hours a night to 4 hours. Even in the winter volunteers still show up to help out. Many organizations like to count their volunteer’s hours in a monetary way. If we were to value our volunteers time at $8/hour than volunteers have contributed $22,624 this year through their labor. That is about $1,800 per month.
Youth Education: Youth Earn-a-Bike is our main program. Though it has changed over the years, we have made it a high priority this year. At the end of March leading into April we changed the way we ran the program and build a new workshop for our youth to learn in. By the end of summer we had a strong volunteer base assisting our youth and this month we painted large mechanical drawings of bike parts on the wall to increase the educational quality of our physical space.
Our data was incomplete January through March, but as you can see by the rest of the graph, we have youth coming into the program year round, even into December. October even rivaled the beginning of summer in June.
Youth put in a total of 920 hours this year working on bikes. That is 100 hours of youth wrenching per month April-December.
Bikes Out Data: Finally, many of you know of our Retail Service Center. We do bike service, sell new accessories and even sell used bikes there. All the profit then funds our programming in Back Alley Bikes. This year, we were not able to get any grants and we reworked much of how we operate. So 100% of our programming was funded by the Service Center, Fund Raisers and Donations.
As I said we do sell used bikes in our Retail Service Center. For folks that donate bikes to us, it may seem deceiving that we sell some of those bikes. However, if you check out the graph above – In 2011 for every bike we sold in the Retail Service Center, we gave away two to youth in our free programming. Not a bad ratio really.
I can’t wait to share more visual data with you next year as we increase the quality of our data and how we track it. Besides doing that we are revamping all of our programs. Quantity and Quality together – they are such a beautiful couple.
See you next year!
– jason x