Volunteer

Join us for our first foray into riding bicycles at Harrisonburg’s Friendly City Fourth. We will have kids activities set up as well as games for adults. It will be fun, inviting and help us reach new people with bicycles. Come out and lend us a hand and let us know if you are interested in volunteering!

Interested in volunteering? Then please email us to RSVP

When: Thursday, July 4 from 4-8 PM

Where: Lindsay Funeral Home Parking lot next to Harrisonburg City Hall

Why: Bikes are fun and we want to spread the joy of riding a bike to more people. This will be the first year that we help Harrisonburg Downtown Renaissance with the Friendly City Fourth to bring the joy of riding a bike to kids and families.

What: We will have the parking lot blocked off and will have plenty of small and fun bikes for kids and adults to ride. Look for fun bike games like the “Slow Race,” skills courses, and more

• What: The Rocktown Trails at Hillandale Park were built by volunteers of the Shenandoah Valley Bicycle Coalition. Our volunteers also maintain the trails and this is the time of year when they need your help to trim back vegetation.
• When: Thursday, June 20 from 4-7 PM
• Where: Rocktown Trails at Hillandale Park
• Who to Contact with Questions? Gretchen Sallah is leading this trail work and you can Email her with your questions
• See the event on Facebook by Clicking Here

Ritchie Vaughan started our Bicycles for Refugees Program. After many years of hard work, Ritchie and the Coalition are looking for folks who might be interested in taking on a lead role with this awesome initiative.

For those of you unfamiliar with this Program, here’s a short primer. Bikes for Refugees (B4R) is split into 2 different programs:

1. We coordinate with the local Refugee Resettlement Office to teach biking classes to refugees who want a bicycle for transportation. Some of these classes are one-on-one if we are teaching a brand-new cyclist how to bike, and sometimes we have up to a dozen students all learning the rules of the road together. At these classes, we give each student a helmet, a pump, and a free bicycle. Each household also gets a free floor pump so they can easily pump up their tires. Each class is typically 2-3 hours long; we start by helping the students fit their new helmets, fit their bikes, and practice pumping up their tires. Then we do some League of American Bicyclists parking lot exercises. We wrap up with a group bicycle ride to practice cycling in traffic on city roads. In most cases, the students live close enough that they ride their bicycles home at the end of the group ride.
2. The second part of our programming is perfect for volunteers who love wrenching on bikes. We receive shop-quality bicycle donations from the community that we restore to donate to our students. We have a storage shed and a fully-outfitted bike workshop on Mt Clinton Pike. We also have some volunteers take bikes home to restore in their private home workshops at their leisure.

Here are our programming needs:

1. More volunteers who want help to teach classes
2. More volunteers who want to repair bicycles (at home or in our workshop)
3. A volunteer to coordinate and be in charge of the refugee bicycling classes
4. A volunteer to coordinate and be in charge of bicycle repairs/restorations

Interested in helping? Email, call, or text Ritchie:

[email protected]

804-512-1485

More info about our B4R programming is here: