We had a banner week in the warehouse the week, while maintaining a well-ventilated, social-distance maintaining environment for our volunteers.
We received 56 new bicycles, bringing our total to an even 760, more than 50% higher than last year’s. Fifty-seven unique volunteers spent over 225 hours refurbishing 110 bikes and cleaning over 100 more. We are more than halfway through the 26″ bikes, and this week we’ll likely finish them and move on to the 700c and other adult sizes.
We’ll continue to accept donated bikes through Thanksgiving.
Troop 944 cleaning bikes 
Planning continues for Giveaway Days. All of our Giveaways will be outdoors, but undercover–we have several scheduled at schools, and a larger one scheduled at Howard Community College’s East Parking Garage on December 12.
We currently have 550 children signed up, mostly through Howard County Public Schools, and have already allocated all of our bikes large enough for children aged seven and older. We are maintaining a waiting list, though, and we do have about 150 bikes, trikes, striders, and scooters remaining to be assigned for preschoolers.
Volunteers are being scheduled for our HCC Giveaway Day on December 12 as well as smaller Giveaway Days on December 7, December 9, and December 19 (so far). You can use our volunteer page, and just answer “no” to the first question about changing a bike tire, to sign up for those opportunities. We’re in need of bike wranglers to load and unload trucks, bike helmet distributors, bike selection assistants, check-in staff, and a variety of other roles.
We plan to maintain mask-wearing and social distancing. Families will sign paperwork with disposable pens and measure their children for helmets using disposable paper measuring tapes (that they’ll keep), and we’ll let recipients select their bikes from a small number of their size to minimize handling. And we’ll of course have gallons of hand sanitizer on hand.
Our first Giveaway is three weeks from tomorrow!