Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

an organized structure was way more professional than we were ready to be. We were willing to miss out on grants and other benefits of a more codified approach in order to try to avoid hierarchies and power struggles and other attendant hazards. (Some of that might also have been laziness.) We have also decided that the logistics of maintaining a yellow bike program would be too much for our small organization to handle unless we had no interest in doing anything else. While it's a fine idea, it's not something we've found a way to fit into our plans at this point.

Bicycles came from various places. Our first big haul was picking up the remains afi:er a campus bike auction?needless to say, that method left us with a lot of useless junk, but it was an exhilarating start. In a short time, bikes and tubs of parts overwhelmed the tiny backyard in which we were working. In our area, the college population generously provides a large number of neglected bikes, and we also get lots of old three- and ten-speeds. The mountain bikes are the ones that find homes the fastest, although they tend to be lower-quality department store bikes, and their fat tires are inefficient for standard around-town and commuting purposes.

One of us financed much of our first couple of years out of his pocket, and was eventually paid back. We started working with community centers and battered women's shelters, fixing up and giving out bikes for the kids that lived there. To the general public, we gave away bikes and repairs in exchange for labor and half-hearted attempts to learn how to do some repairs. We were, and still are, pretty lenient about this: we have discussed the possibility of applying for non-profit status, writing up "prices" (hours worked, perhaps) for a list of repairs and other services, and a number of other recurring issues, but we never have. We generally inform anyone that isn't wiUing to work v^dth us for a bike that we charge $50, which helps us make back some cash, but that is a pretty small number of people. We have also traded bikes for stickers that we use to track the bicycles we repair, and for food and other useful things. The real vidndfall for us came

when a local bike shop agreed to sponsor us with a decent yearly contribution, enough to get us some tools and parts, which enabled us to expand our efforts.

We spread the bike gospel on the local television channel. We had articles written about us in the paper. We rafHed a bike at a local film festival. We moved to a bigger backyard. It was the fucking American Dream. Next, we hope to acquire a two-car garage!

We also gave away all our Saturdays, Our core group of members, while people have come and gone, remains at a constant four to five people. It has sometimes appeared that we were going to be left with few committed members, a couple of unfortunates desperately trying to get everything under control, but that hasn't happened yet. We have distributed more than 450 bikes in the past four years, and we have throvwi out what feels like ten thousand rusty Murrays and Huffys, I don't feel like a bike collective is a way to accomplish big things: for that, you will need lobbyists or molotov cocktails, and lots of time. But bike collectives can accomplish very concrete things, even if they're small. I hope that we can claim some responsibility for the bike racks at the local co-op always being crowded. And if a couple dozen people now patch their own inner tubes rather than paying a bike shop $15 to do it, well, then that's enough for me.

Bicycle Collectiues 99

Bicycle Parades

Ingredients B i cyc le s

Riders