A group of individuals and in Brattleboro VT, will be collecting and shipping a 40 foot container of bikes and books to Ghana, in partnership with Bikes Not Bombs. Bike dropoff days are scheduled for the upcoming weeks (see below), with the shipment to be loaded on the 8th of November.

Bikes Not Bombs is looking for a bookkeeper to work 16-20 hours per week. Experience with QuickBooks required. Must have excellent attention to detail. Potential to grow into an expanded, full-time position encompassing financial management and human resources in 2009. Please call Sam Wechsler at 617-522-0222 or write hiring@bikesnotbombs.org for more information.

Fall session:
September 19th - November 21st 2008

spaces still open to join

Carl Kurz, BNB's International Director and founder, has just visited the Diepsloot Youth Cycles Project, both a youth training center and a full service bicycle shop. Bikes Not Bombs sent bikes, tools, and trainers Alex Twombly and Omar Bhimji to establish this project in 2005.

David Branigan, BNB mechanic, has been in Ghana since May starting a new project (many of you are familiar with the pre-existing Village Bicycle Project in Ghana where we've shipped bikes for years).

We need some special volunteers who can sign on for some regular hours over a long period of time. Let us know what type of schedule might work for you and your skills and interests.

Bike Parts Organizing

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU BIKE-A-THON RIDERS AND VOLUNTEERS! Over three hundred of you riders braved the sweltering heat on Sunday June 8th and made heroic rides. What a day! At 8:30 in the morning the line to check in for the 62 miler stretched across the field.

You all accomplished an amazing thing for Bikes Not Bombs with your fundraising - $95,000 has come in so far and when the remaining pledges come in we're looking at $105,000! Our most successful Bike-A-Thon before this raised $42,000, so we've more than doubled that record. This is an unbelievable success for Bikes Not Bombs! With your help, BNB is keeping up with its expansions in youth leadership and international work.

On Sunday, June 15th Bikes Not Bombs volunteers loaded a 40' shipping container with 464 donated and many buckets and bundles of spare parts, now on its way to the Diepsloot, South Africa "Youth Cycles Project."

We would love a donation of walkie-talkies that get at least a 1-2 mile range or so. They are so helpful to have on youth rides for the leader and the sweeper to communicate if something happens and part of the group gets separated. Contact mattbikesnotbombs.org

We need another 95 helmets to reach our goal of 100 helmets for the Nevis Island Earn-A-Bike youth programs started by Bikes Not Bombs one year ago. The program is doing very well: the workshop space is now booked up in schedule to be shared by seven different communities on this Caribbean Island (federated with St.

Almost every Wednesday night at BNB's Hub (284 Amory) 7-10 pm you are invited to drop in to Volunteer Night, processing donated bikes, getting them ready to ship overseas, stripping parts from bad frames, sorting parts, and other projects. You don't need mechanical experience - we'll show you what to do.

1/16/08
an update from Carl Kurz, BNB's International Director

Six months into enjoying our fabulous, custom spaces, we still face the big challenge of raising $150,000 more - in addition to our regular operating costs - to finish paying for our Capital Campaign total of $550,000. Grassroots fundraising is essential to this organization, and we have been delighted and encouraged by the enthusiasm and contributions of our supporters.

Mira Brown has left the BNB staff after many years of amazing contributions. She writes:

Here is a piece of May news from the Nicaragua Network (see www.nicanet.org). Bikes Not Bombs was founded in opposition to the US-run contra war in Nicaragua in the early 80's, and for years all BNB shipments and trainers went to Nicaragua. This new statement is a reminder of where we've been and the injustice that continues.

As the war in Iraq drags on, many of us are simply inured to the notion of violence so far distant from our daily lives. It is worthwhile to take a moment of silence and ponder the unknown costs of this war in human lives.

from Michael Blunk, BNB trainer, April 29, 2007

Maggie Cohn, a BNB Board Member, has as her day job the management of the Mission Hill Main Streets program (www.missionhillmainstreets.org). She has let us know about an initiative that is being taken up by all 19 Main Street districts in Boston - it's called the Community Change Card, and this is how it works:

BNB’s newest project is underway on Nevis Island in the Caribbean, an island federated with St. Kitts. The project is setting up Earn-A-Bike youth programs for local teens, based on the classes taught at BNB, and using bikes donated from the Boston area. Thanks to all of you who donated the bikes, processed them at Wednesday volunteer nights, and helped load the container of nearly 500 donated bikes and spare parts which we sent January 15th!

Let us know if you have skills, interest, time, to help program and/or maintain a database in Filemaker (which version are you familiar with), PHP, or MySQL.