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At-risk youth fixing up bicycles

posted by Stephanie.Wilding

At-risk youth fixing up bicycles
By ANDREW HANON, QMI Agency



EDMONTON - Jordan looks up from the mountain bike he's working on and says sarcastically, "I'm here against my will."
With a sly grin, he adds, "my mom made me come."
The teen is one of a half-dozen kids working on bikes in the old Alberta Cycle building on 118 Avenue. They're the last crop of participants in a program called "the spoke" designed to give underprivileged and at-risk youth a chance to make something with their own hands.
It's no coincidence that they're working on bikes.
The spoke was originally an alternative justice program for a bunch of 11 and 12-year-olds in the area who were effectively operating a bicycle chop shop.
"They were going all the way to the University of Alberta, stealing bikes there, bringing them back here and breaking them down," explains Kris Andreychuk, a social worker with the Edmonton police Alberta Avenue-area Neighbourhood Empowerment Team.
The kids would mix and match parts to make entirely new machines, which they would either keep or sell to pawn shops.
Andreychuk got the idea for the spoke after local children's services workers called a meeting early this year to figure out what to do with the young bike thieves.
"I just kind of joked that obviously, they're highly skilled. Maybe they could all get jobs at bike shops."
The more he thought about it, the more it made sense.
City cops supply unclaimed bikes that have been turned in to them, but are too beat up to auctioned off.
The kids choose one from the pile and with the help of volunteers from the Edmonton Bicycle Commuters club, it becomes their project for the next six weeks.
"We make it clear to them, this isn't a drop-in," says Andreychuk. "If start, you've got to attend every week for six weeks."
All tools and spare parts are supplied.
"It's been far more successful than we dreamed," says Andreychuk. "Our first group went through over the summer. We're on our second group now and our third and fourth are already booked up."
It didn't take long for word to get out. Soon other agencies were trying to get kids on the spoke's list.
In Jordan's case, it was his mother, who figured something had to be done before he ended up in handcuffs.
"I had some friends who were getting into trouble," he says. One friend was shoplifting and he was caught along with him. Luckily for him, Jordan wasn't charged with anything. Then he got ticketed for jaywalking.
"I might not have gotten the ticket, but I was, uh, a little defensive," he explains.
The spoke's goal is to get kids doing something productive before they get into serious trouble.
"We really like the ownership aspect of it," says Christopher Chan of the EBC. "It's great to see the kids put so much effort into the bikes. Hopefully it will help them appreciate how frustrating it would be to have it stolen from them. Whoever would do that to them must be jerk."
Youth worker Ryan Hall stopped by Tuesday night after seeing the transformation in one of his young offender charges.
"This is really cool," Hall says, watch the boy coast around on a bike he built virtually from scratch. "It's a great activity for him. He looks forward to coming here every week."
"Ultimately, this program is not simply about building bikes," Andreychuk says. "It's about building relationships."
andrew.hanon@sunmedia.ca
Follow me on Twitter:
twitter.com/andrewhanon

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