BALTIMORE - Every Thursday afternoon like clockwork, a group of teens in orange aprons huddles around a collection of brightly-colored bikes next to a skate park in the city’s Inner Harbor.

Two of them are snapping the front derailleur of a blue two-wheeler back into place so the rider can change gears. Another group is swapping a torn brown leather seat for a freshly-covered black one.

This is the Baltimore Youth Kinetic Energy Collective, called BYKE for short — a local nonprofit that teaches young people in the city to repair bikes at no cost to the rider. Their work has been a staple in the community since 2014.

“We teach young people this skill so that they can have a safer bike moving forward,” said Executive Director Jasper Barnes. “And then within their community, they can do small repairs, be advocates for young people around them as well, and adults. So it really gives that autonomy, it really offsets the costs for the community.”

BYKE saved Baltimore residents around $300,000 last year, Barnes said, based on the number and cost of materials they used to help clients. And that’s not counting the supplies the group gives out from a spray-painted bus they drive around the city, which they purchased using a big grant in 2021 to pivot their services during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“People look at us, they're like, ‘Ah, it’s just a bike repair shop.’ No, we're leveraging financial stability out of our bus,” Barnes said. “We're providing hygiene care items, condoms, school supplies, food pantry access, referrals to other services that might be needed.”

It took a lot of sweat and innovation for BYKE to become the organization it is now, Barnes said. It all started in 2013, when BYKE founder Evelyn “Chavi” Rhodes noticed that the free repair workshop she attended in Station North wasn’t helping the young cyclists gathering inside. So, Rhodes decided to launch her own once-a-week after school program with a team of three staff.

All of the original staff went without pay for four years, volunteering their time and supplies out-of-pocket.

BYKE’s leaders began applying for grants to boost their services in 2015, which led to the purchase of the group’s first physical building space in Midtown.

Barnes said young cyclists “made the space,” painting the walls and adding their own art. And then they started asking for more than just an afterschool program. They wanted employment opportunities.

“One of our main goals is to really strive for 100% ownership of youth-led and youth-centered programming,” Barnes said. “And the way that we do that is through our Golden Fleet Internship program.”

BYKE’s Golden Fleet Interns, a group of eight ranging in age from 15 to 23, are paid $15 an hour to run repairs. That’s on par with the city’s minimum wage.

Still, Barnes says, BYKE runs on “close to nothing.” The group’s annual budget totals about $200,000 – with around 60% coming from grants, 30% from contracts with other local partners like Baltimore City Schools, and the final 10% from events and donations.

“This is my secondary job; I have three in total,” said 19-year-old Maddie Wilson. Her main gig to support herself and her one-year old daughter is being an usher at Orioles stadium. But she says working at BYKE is much more fruitful.

“It's more like a path of adventure or what I want to learn,” she said. “I might become a bike mechanic. I might become a car mechanic next. You never know.”

Barnes says the goal is to keep the intern’s schedules flexible and open.

“So they can still focus on school, trade, family, whatever needs to sustain their own development and lives,” Barnes said. “But they also have that financial stability through our organization.”

Interns say the benefits go beyond finances. Wilson says biking means freedom — the ability to go anywhere she wants.

Josh, another 18-year-old intern, said biking is a productive outlet. We agreed to use only his first name because of his fear of possible discrimination in future employment.

“If we're not in school, we need something to keep us busy. Not just staying in a house, playing games all day,” he said. “So that's why this attracts me, to come outside and get some air, to get my mind on the right thing and reach my goals.”

Barnes and other advocates say BYKE’s work is also a response to inequities in resources and misconceptions that impact how young people — especially young people of color — are treated and supported.

Youth cyclists “just want a space where they can congregate, have fun, share their skills, explore, and really stay out of trouble,” Barnes said. “And when they're constantly being criminalized for things that aren't their responsibility, they're being accused of things that they didn't perpetuate, it's really frustrating.”

The ‘white L’ in Baltimore biking

Barnes said BYKE is in the business of “decentralizing resources.”

“Bike mechanics and repair, and the culture of bike riding and accessibility, is extremely expensive,” they said. “And a lot of the shops are within the affluent community, or within the ‘white L.’”

This is what makes the mobile bus so essential — it allows BYKE to meet customers where they are.

A map of bike lanes and shops on the Baltimore City Department of Transportation website shows nearly all of them are located along the central line of the area and out right along the Inner Harbor, known locally as the “white L.” Communities in East and West Baltimore, the region’s predominantly Black areas, are almost entirely bike-resource deserts.

Shaka Pitts is the founder of Black People Ride Bikes, a Baltimore-based organization advocating for Black cyclists. He said bike lanes and shops “aren't built for us in mind.”

“There's a stigma that says there aren't a lot of Black people who ride,” Pitts said. “And that’s been our perception, on the Black side of the fence and the white side of the fence.” That stigma translates into unequal community infrastructure, he said.

“If you're putting safety measures in Canton and Fells Point, we want those safety measures in Sandtown and North Avenue as well,” Pitts said.

Racial disparities in biking culture exist nationwide, not just in Baltimore. A 2020 review of police data by Bicycling magazine found that Black and brown cyclists were more likely than white riders to be stopped, searched and ticketed across the U.S. Grist reported on a similar trend and the lack of infrastructure contributing to it, in Chicago. WGBH in Boston did the same.

Quarron, a 20-year-old BYKE intern also using only his first name to avoid potential employment discrimination, said he’s been denied service at a few bike shops in the city.

“I asked [the owner] for some tires; he said no, didn’t even go back to check for them,” Quarron said.

He also said he’s been verbally insulted and threatened when he’s biking with his friends.

“We'll make one lane for the cars, and they will sit behind us on their horns constantly,” he said. “And if we don't move, they’re gonna hit us…and it's all cars, trucks, buses, U-Haul trucks, semis, they are all trying to hit us.”

Quarron said he thinks that hateful behavior comes from misconceptions.

“They think we’re trying to hurt people, hit people, go in stores and steal,” he said. “Or they are just entitled to the road and think everybody else is not.”

Barnes said BYKE tries to stay “as grassroots as possible,” spreading the young people’s work mainly by word-of-mouth or posting their schedules and locations on their Instagram account.

That good work speaks for itself in the spaces BYKE occupies. At the Inner Harbor, one man approached to ask if the team could fix his breaks. A police officer hopped out of her car to talk to two interns, and said she’d bring her bike back sometime for repairs.

Dayvon Love, director of public policy at Black advocacy organization Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, said the stigma Black youth face comes from white adults perceiving them as a threat.

“Whether they're walking, whether they're riding bikes…there is that heightened level of threat that is often justified by these notions of inherent criminality that are attributed to Black youth,” he said.

Pitts says there are some cases where young people are riding recklessly and “need to do better.”

“You cannot do a wheelie in the street towards oncoming traffic and swerve out the way and think they're not going to have a problem,” he said.

But Barnes argues that there needs to be some grace for “slightly risky behavior” from teenagers and kids. According to the UCLA Center for the Developing Adolescent, youth are more likely to engage in activities with unknown outcomes because they have higher tolerance for ambiguity — and because their developing brains release higher dopamine in the face of risk.

Barnes said that BYKE gives young people “space to make mistakes” by using peer mentorship to counter harmful narratives about themselves or others that often stem from oppression and violence they’ve faced. But BYKE can’t solve those systemic issues, Barnes said, as much as they want to.

“We can acknowledge it, see it, provide resources,” they said. “But we are not doctors; we are not food centers; we are not a health clinic.”

‘Teaching people how to fish’

Quarron says the community at BYKE does help quiet outside stressors.

“No matter the sun, cloudy, foggy, I just come and I have a good time with these clowns I call brothers,” he said.

Barnes says they make an effort to celebrate interns’ achievements, whether it’s graduating high school or starting their own company.

“The fact that they're functioning healthy persons, for us, is very successful,” they said. “When they're not sick, when they're not injured, when they're not facing some emergency response, we find that as a very successful indicator.”

Barnes also said that many of the Golden Fleet interns come to BYKE shy, or have difficulty expressing their emotions. But they always open up with peers or when talking at biking conferences, they said.

Dice, who also requested to use his first name only, is the youngest intern at 15-years-old. He said developing bike repair skills builds that confidence naturally.

“You feel more accomplished when you learn how to do something yourself, and then you just do it,” he said. “Especially because not a lot of people feel like constantly putting down money when something breaks.”

Love said providing enjoyable activities and spaces to partake in them is a real, effective way to better support young people in Baltimore. And it doesn’t hurt, Pitts added, if that activity guarantees transportation and income.

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention says that improving educational and employment opportunities for youth is a top strategy for deterring risk of involvement in crime and violence, especially when those programs include strong mentors. And while some studies show positive effects on academic achievement and life outcomes, experts argue that more thorough research is needed.

On the local level, BYKE is “teaching people how to fish,” Pitts said. “Now, they don't need to go beg for fish from other people who really don't want to sell them fish or give them fish.”

This story is part of Agents of change: Community efforts to overcome racial inequities, an editorial series created in collaboration with Report for America, with the support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, that highlights the efforts of local communities to address racial inequalities through grassroots approaches.