HELPING KIDS 1 Kennedy Park rides on BY SARA DONNELLY

Matt Velguth runs the Bike Shop in Portland’s Kennedy Park low-income housing project. Overseen by Alliance for Transportation Choice, in Portland, the Bike Shop is a grants-funded nonprofit which uses bike maintenance and trips to help disadvantaged children explore their environment, exercise, and gain self-esteem. Velguth, 38, helped found the program in July 2004. Since then, he has worked with more than 450 children aged eight to 17. Participants pay $5 for a donated mountain bike and $1 for parts. As Velguth readies for the winter biking season (yes, they run trips in the colder months), the Phoenix sat down with him to talk about the program.

Where did you come up with the idea for the Bike Shop?

For the last 15 years I’ve been working mostly with at-risk kids in jails, in schools. My wife and I bike tour extensively and we met a man on tour [who had started a similar program]. But he took the opposite end of the spectrum — the brightest achievers, the wealthiest kids — and he would take them out on tours around the country. I started to seriously play around with this. How could I do this working at the other end of the spectrum? Later, [my wife and I] landed in Portland and I looked around. I knew Eli [Cayer] and Erik West, who were both involved biking in the community, and we took the program here and opened it in Kennedy Park.

What did the kids think?

In the beginning, kids started to bring in bikes they had "found." And they probably had, someone might have taken the bike and then discarded it by the road. I said you can’t do that. You can get one. If you can pick up 10 cans a day for 10 days, you’ve got a bike. Nobody can not afford to have a bike. They learned that I would not let them fix the found or stolen bikes. Now we find out who owned them and about two-thirds of them go back to the rightful owner.

Isn’t winter biking rough on them?

The shop has neoprene gloves, balaclavas [face masks], and neoprene booties for their shoes. The [winter] rides get a little shorter — if the weather’s just plain nasty, we just hop down to Exchange Street. We called it off once last winter when there was a whiteout blizzard. That was the only day that was called for weather.

What are your plans for the future of the project?

The majority of [the Bike Shop funding] is still larger grants and we’re trying to move toward a sustainable, more local funding base. I want this to be a model that could be used elsewhere and I think it’s important for the project to belong to Portland.

For more on the Bike Shop, check out www.thealliancefortransportationchoice.org