Bikes for the world.

• Author: DiNovella, Elizabeth
• Position: On the Line - Working Bikes Cooperative - Brief Article

"Bikes are magical," says Lee Ravenscroft amid piles of tires, handlebars, gear boxes, and buckets of chains in the unheated warehouse of Working Bikes Cooperative. The all-volunteer group takes donated and discarded bikes, repairs them, and then distributes them locally and internationally.

"People get a vandalized wheel or they break a couple cables and they don't want to pay for the repairs so they put it out in the alley," says Ravenscroft. "We get a lot of bikes this way--about thirty a week. Our aim is to get more people riding bikes in Chicago and developing countries."

The cooperative has working relationships with nongovernmental organizations in Latin America and Africa. In April, the three-year-old group plans to ship several hundred bikes to Angola. And it recently managed to send a volunteer to...