A borrowed bike for getting around
This photo taken earlier this year by Matthew Witchell was supplied to MPR by Cycles for Change.
Community Bike Library program director Claire Stoscheck works with Cycles for Change. She's helping a young person with the Karen Organization of Minnesota get acquainted with a loaner she's borrowing from the Bike Library for six months.
Our car-crazy culture obscures an important reality.
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There are Twin Cities neighborhoods, surveys show, where as many as half the residents don't own a personal vehicle.
And they're not just the Karen, refugees from Burma also known as Myanmar.
They are families of all sorts who share a sobering economic status - they're poor. Or in some cases, maybe even earning enough to approach middle class status. But still not able to afford a car given the price of gas and all the attendant costs.
Tomorrow, April 27, in St. Paul at the Hubbs Center for Lifelong Learning the Community Bike Partners Library folks say they will hold another session to loan bikes:
The orientation is the seventh in a series of 19 to take place in April and May at Twin Cities organizations partnering with the CPBL to provide bikes and safe cycling education to low-income and traditionally marginalized community members, including immigrants, refugees, women and people of color. The CPBL will loan out 250 bikes in the 2012 season.