Back in 2019 when COVID 19 hit, a group of young people wanted to be part of the solution….. they wanted to get active and support their local community and local businesses. The Bike Drop was born.
A community interest company that offers a sustainable pedal-powered delivery service for Stroud District, we partnered up with as many local businesses as we could. We helped retailers set up online retailing, which we could deliver whilst shops were closed under government lockdown. We started grocery delivery by bike services in conjunction with multiple local collectives, and even trialled a local take away hot food delivery service on select evenings with some of the restaurants in town.
Founded as a partnership between Creative Sustainability (Owners of Access Bike Project and generally inspirational local folk doing wonderful stuff and bringing about lasting change since 2010) and L4 Enterprises CIC (that inspired the Grace Network social enterprise group of CICs ).
As the world opened up again in 2020, we continued to offer a local delivery service on our fleet of e bikes, and also started training some of our riders with the skills to fix bikes: ours, theirs, and eventually, paying customers’. Six months of intensive training for two trainees, who were paid properly for their working hours. We gradually started taking in more and more customer bikes for service and repair.
Just as this new dimension to The Bike Drop blossomed, a new challenge, THE MOVE. A big move from Brimscombe Port to Brimscombe Mills, along with the rest of the Grace Network family, The Long Table, Kids Stuff, Furniture Bank, and Gloucestershire House Clearances meant a long, hard winter of turning our hands to concrete floor repairs, roof repairs, and construction of a new home and dedicated bike workshop. That winter was make or break for all the CICs, morale and warmth needed weekly, and eventually daily, reinforcement.
In the spirit of all great refurbishment and build projects, news of two impending Bike Drop babies, set to arrive within weeks of one another brought joy and panic simultaneously.
The first quarter of 2022 welcomed two babies, and a full scale professionally equipped mechanic workshop for bike servicing and repair.
As 2022 progressed the workshop grew into a valued community resource, with an ever growing base of regular customers.
Wanting to follow the format of our warehouse and Grace Network sister businesses (Kids Stuff, Furniture Bank and the Long Table), we started to accept donations of bikes, and after fully servicing and adding new parts as required, we started to offer them for sale.
Following the decision to close his own bike shop in Wotton Under Edge, Tristan was our first choice from a brilliant selection of experienced bike mechanics interviewed for a full time position to add to the workshop capacity. He joined in May 2023 and the workshop has been steadily growing ever since.
Without pausing for breath, Harry was keen to get another training scheme up and running, and with a new workshop built specifically for the task and another round of interviews, two apprentices joined the team in November 2023. They have received 3 weekly 'formal' training sessions of 3 hours each, but are employed on a full time contract at a proper wage (not a measly apprenticeship £5 an hour, because who can live on that?), spending the rest of their time practicing the newly acquired knowledge on donated bikes or helping in the shop.
With the apprentices having undergone a two week residential training course in Oxford, culminating in an assessment for cytech level 2, and experienced mechanics, Kes and Tris also breezing through the cytech 2 assessment we now have everyone 'ticketed'.
As we look to the (very near) future we will see a second Bike Drop landing alongside some other Grace Network favourites (Long Table and Kids Stuff) in Cirencester soon!
