Advocacy & Safety - Bike Recycling Idea

I know there are a lot of organizations out there that recycle bikes. Most are organizations that take in bikes, repair them, and redistribute them either locally or ship them elsewhere. This is great for a large city.

Here in Maine, we have one "large city", Portland, which is really more of a large town, a handful of slightly smaller "cities", lots of really small towns, and lots of rural countryside. The population is very spread out. Lots of people around the state not within driving distance of a place to drop off unwanted bikes except the town transfer station. When we did our "Bikes for the Bayou (http://www.bikes4thebayou.org/)" effort, we discovered a wealth of unwanted bikes in peoples' garages, sheds, and basements, far too many for us to put into our chartered truck. Clearly there was an untapped resource here, but how to get so many spread out bikes from point A to point B? I sensed at our collection event that many people would be glad to donate their bikes to a worthy cause, if it was made convenient for them to do so.

So I've been mulling over an idea for an ongoing program of connecting unwanted bikes to existing programs around the state, and to larger programs that might even ship them long distance. (Notably, Bikes Not Bombs (http://www.bikesnotbombs.org/) in Boston.) I see it as a network of partners providing different services, which could be utilized in different combinations as needed to move bikes around from source to destination. I've written up an initial description here (http://www.bikes4thebayou.org/mbrn.html), and would love it if anyone had suggestions and pointers to similar efforts. Thanks!

I live in Maine, I sometimes bike to Portland on boring nights, I live in Bath. I work at Bath Cycle & Ski, heard of it?

My dad does some work at homeless shelters and I've often thought that it would be a worthwhile service to provide bicycles for transport for those people. I'm not sure how many shelters there are in Maine being as spread out as it is, but it may be another cause to look into. It's something I want to try for this year.

Well, many cities have loaner bike programs, often called "yellow bike" programs (painted yellow to make them more recognizable and less desirable for theft), and that would be good too, but that's not what I mean. In my model, however, organizations that work with the poor could join the network as recipient partners so that their clients could receive bikes of their own, hopefully coupled with some kind of earning requirements and safety training. Or perhaps even a yellow bike project itself could be a recipient partner in the network. I imagine certain types of bikes are ideal for becoming "yellow bikes".