John from BR-A-CE with a newly tuned-up cyclist!

We held BR-A-CE’s first official fundraiser this past Saturday, a bike and stroller tune-up for donations.  The venue was on the outskirts of Harvard Square, and though it was overcast, it was a pleasant enough day for our volunteer bike mechanics to set up right on the brick sidewalks.

We wound up recruiting enough cyclists in need of brake tweaking and chain degreasing to kick off our season of official fundraising for Mattapan’s Mobile Farm Stand.  It was also a great opportunity to get our name out and to get a little street publicity for the Mobile Farm Stand project.  If you didn’t get a chance to stop by, no worries – we’re already brainstorming another event, probably in Mattapan itself next time, or in Providence, RI.  Look for updates about that as soon as we have details nailed down.

Huge thanks go out to our bike mechanic and recruiter volunteers from the Rhode Island School of Design:  Kory Almryde; Kevin Saxon; Allison Johnson; Chris Ardoin; Saja Tourbah; and John DiSalvo.  And thanks to all those donors who stopped by!  You can find their names, as well as the list of all our donors, on our Donors page.

For now, it’s literally back to the drawing board with us, as we have a meeting scheduled next week to advance the design ideas for the Farm Stand.  It will be a great chance to get all our partners in the same room to have an in-depth discussion on what the owners & operators of the Farm Stand really need to make the project functional.  Summer’s just around the corner, but we’re still optimistic that we can catch the tail end of the market season.

In the meantime, the popularity of pedal-powered cargo bikes, mobile food carts, and DIY bike frame building seems to be exploding, according to recent articles in the Boston Globe and the New York Times.  It’s an exciting time for this kind of work!

-Kristen