Featured Volunteer: JDS

It must be Thursday! Meet the wheel crew from Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School. We are fortunate to be just across the street from CESJDS, but really our fortune is the students who arrive just after school every Thursday. 

The Super Eight are Shai, Ezra, David, Max, Yaniv, Ivan, Ben, and Emmanuel. The Thursday night wheel crew. They started as just a couple of guys who popped over to get some service hours one Thursday. And then the group just kept growing. They now arrive and quietly set up their chairs, grab their wheels and tools and settle in. And then the chatter unleashes. 

This group of guys sit and tackle wheels for the benefit of our programs around the world. And while they are here they also tackle philosophy questions, Survivor scenarios, and occasionally break out into their own version of Pentatonix...or perhaps that should be Octotonix. The bottom line is they have fun. They make volunteering fun and that's important to us. 

We really lucked out with this warehouse location that we found eight years ago. JDS invited us over for a day of service when one of the moms got roped into managing a collection in 2018. That was Alex's mom Lisa and the two of them have been hosting bike collections since! Although on their own since they are both active cyclists. And Alex is now a student at UMD.

But the relationship with JDS grew. We now participate in several service projects throughout the school year. The students have helped in the shop, they've loaded containers, and yes, they've compacted bikes and deconstructed wheels. 

The purpose of this 'wheel party' Thursday is to salvage the usable components of a wheel that may no longer function as a bike wheel. There may be a crack in the rim or the hub is no longer any good. There are times we can save the rim or hub and almost always the spokes. But it's a time consuming activity and the wheel pile can often stretch high above our heads. 

Volunteers use specialized wrenches and screwdrivers to take apart the spokes and delace them from the hubs. They then reattach the spoke nipples to the spokes so they can be used again to replace a broken spoke or rebuild an entire wheel overseas. One broken spoke can make a wheel unstable and compromise a bike, especially on rough terrain.

It's not just the crew from JDS working on wheels every Thursday. We have a decent turn out from Good Counsel as well. They also take apart wheels and cut the spokes from the wheel pile not worth saving. That way we can recycle the metal here rather than ship junk to our partners. 

And so if you ever drop by on a Thursday evening and hear Imagine Dragons coming from the back...it just might be the JDS Octotonix Wheel Crew..."You break me down and build me up believer, believer Pain!"