Bikes Together

Background Statement

Bikes Together, formerly The Bike Depot, is a 501(c)(3) based in the La Alma Lincoln Park neighborhood. Our mission is to transform our community through bicycle access and education.

Bikes Together's origins date back to the mid-1990s when a group of residents created the Park Hill Bike Club. These residents wanted to use bicycles to create alternatives to youth gang involvement and substance misuse while promoting a culture of friendship, mutual respect, and diversity and offering recreational, educational, and employment opportunities for youth. In 2005, LiveWell Colorado's Park Hill Thriving Communities began endeavors to lessen the health disparities that existed in Park Hill and began the process of taking the bike club idea one step further. They helped by organizing community leaders, forging partnerships, investing funds and securing in-kind donations, and established The Bike Depot's shop in 2008.

In 2016 Bikes Together opened a second location in the La Alma/Lincoln Park neighborhood near 11th and Osage. In 2021, we consolidated our public-facing operations to this location.

Since opening day, Bikes Together has gone from an intermittently open shop to the fully staffed (by paid employees and volunteers), full service bike shop that offers space, classes, bicycles, parts, recycling, and community. We have grown partnerships with public, private and nonprofit agencies, expanded programming specifically by and for populations historically excluded from bike culture (especially women, transgender & femme people of all races and Black, Indigenous and People of Color of all genders), and grown the number of bicycles we recover, recycle, repair, refurbish and return to the streets, all while empowering a new generation of Denverites to fix and renew things instead of throwing them away.