Book of Dreams: Group started by grade schoolers has donated more than 500 bikes

As the young men of Boys 4 Bikes began filtering into Sutterville Bicycle Co. on a recent Friday evening, Mary Kelly stood near a photo, displayed on a store wall, that clearly was from a different time.

In the 2014 photo, Kelly’s son, Owen Wilber, and five other boys stand with shop owner Jeff Dzurinko. Dzurinko’s business had recently opened and the boys were mostly third graders who had just started Boys 4 Bikes, which donates bikes to foster youth, refugees and middle schoolers.

The group is seeking $5,000 in funding this year from readers of The Sacramento Bee’s Book of Dreams effort.

“They were just babies,” Kelly said of that first effort a decade ago.

Now, most of the boys from the photo are high school seniors. Boys 4 Bikes has evolved into a tax-exempt nonprofit. And on this evening, it was closing in on donating its 500th bike.

The task for Wilber and three other boys on-hand from the old photo – Rowan Diepenbrock, Riley Domine and Winston Holtkamp – was relatively straightforward: Load up 25 bikes with the help of Dzurinko and a small number of adult volunteers and take them to Stanford Settlement Neighborhood Center to donate to needy kids.

Most, if not all, of the bikes were simple Retrospecs, sturdy and nothing flashy. Still, these bikes can make a big difference at places like Stanford Sierra Youth & Families, a group aiding foster kids that Boys 4 Bikes was planning to visit a week or so later.

That organization gives out bikes on a case-by-case basis to the youth it helps, said its community engagement manager Karla Zaragoza.

“It’s really important that the bikes be a little bit higher quality because they only go out to older youth who need them for transportation purposes, so either to go to school or to go to a job,” Zaragoza said. “So the bikes are really, really special.”

Stanford Settlement Neighborhood Center uses a raffle to determine which of the roughly 1,000 people it helps gets a bike.

“It’s just delightful to see a parent who has the opportunity to take home a brand-new bike for their child for Christmas when that might have not been in their budget for this year,” said Julie Rhoten, the neighborhood center’s executive director.

Each organization — Stanford Sierra Youth and Stanford Settlement — has received about 200 bicycles from Boys 4 Bikes over the years.

The origin of the program

In the beginning, Boys 4 Bikes wasn’t a nonprofit, just a way for Kelly to teach her son a valuable lesson when she spied him around Christmas one year looking at store advertisements and circling things that he wanted.

“I was like, ‘Owen, before you talk to me anymore about what you want, you need to talk to me about what you’re going to do for somebody else,’” Kelly said.

Wilber thought about it and replied that he wanted to buy someone a bike. Kelly then encouraged him to hold a neighborhood bake sale and he roped in some of his friends from school and the neighborhood.

Kelly approached several bike shops, including Dzurinko’s, to see if she could purchase bikes at a discounted rate. Dzurinko was happy to help.

“I know from my firsthand experience … the freedoms that a bicycle gives you,” Dzurinko said.

Over the years, the boys have raised more than $60,000 through their bake sales and other efforts. In turn, they have worked with Dzurinko to purchase bikes at near-wholesale rates.

Holtkamp, a senior at McClatchy High School who hopes to study engineering at Cal Poly, estimated that the boys will have donated 510 to 520 bikes with the ones they are getting from Dzurinko’s shop this year. Most are new. Some are refurbished.

“I’ve valued biking a lot because it’s a very clean way of transportation,” Diepenbrock said. “But it’s also a very reliable and a very easy-access form of transportation. So for that to go to people in need, I think that is really cool and really important.”

What’s ahead for Boys 4 Bikes

College beckons for most members of Boys 4 Bikes, with Diepenbrock just finishing his first semester at Sacramento State and the other boys now working on college applications. Domine said he’s written two of his college-application essays about his experience with Boys 4 Bikes.

“I can still remember vaguely our first bake sale and then we kept building up and up and up,” said Domine, a senior at West Campus who hopes to pursue urban planning or medical studies at UC Irvine. “It just kind of flashed by, but I’m really glad to be a part of this.”

Keeping the organization going will require something of a shift. Wilber, a senior at UMOJA International Academy who would like to study industrial engineering at Cal Poly, acknowledged that it will be difficult for the boys to keep holding bake sales once they go off to college.

Still, they’re hopeful and have been considering using their nonprofit status to approach businesses for donations.

“I’d love to continue it,” said Wilber, who is now the board president for Boys 4 Bikes. “I think my friends would love to continue it.”

On the recent Friday evening, it didn’t take long for the 25 bikes to be loaded and for the boys and other volunteers to maneuver in different vehicles up to Stanford Settlement Neighborhood Center, near the corner of Northgate Boulevard and West El Camino Avenue.

There, the boys quickly unloaded the bikes and took them to a multipurpose room, their entire visit lasting only a short time.

“They’re so generous,” said Rhoten, the neighborhood center’s executive director, referring to Boys 4 Bikes. “These kids, they’ve grown it into a giant thing.”

Book of Dreams

The request: Box: Boys 4 Bikes wants to be able to continue its decade-long mission of donating bicycles to needy youths in the Sacramento area.

The cost: $5,000