Font ResizeMORAGA — Bobbie Preston's distaste for seeing salvageable bicycles dumped in landfills spurred a program that has united more than 1,200 bikes with happy young pedalers.
Bobbie and her husband, Tom, are in the midst of their eighth annual Cycle Recycle program, in which the couple takes donations of bikes and trikes — some new, but most in need of some repair — to the Marsh Creek Jail outside Clayton, where inmates repair them.
The spiffed-up bikes are then given at Christmas to underprivileged children throughout Contra Costa County, through such community organizations as Cambridge Community Center, Salvation Army, Monument Crisis Center and the Volunteer Center.
With residents dropping off the bikes, and jail inmates doing the repair work, the Prestons' main job with their program is to drum up publicity, and give up part of their driveway for a few weeks each fall.
"It's amazing how little effort on our part results in such a great benefit," Bobbie Preston said.
The Prestons are accepting donations through Monday for this year's drive.
The Prestons started Cycle Recycle in 2002, when they saw what they felt was an unacceptable number of bikes, most not so beat up, dumped curbside on their neighborhood's "big garbage day" waiting to take up space in a landfill.
Initially, the collected bikes were donated to the Oakland Police Officers Outreach program, but the bikes started going to the Marsh Creek
The bikes are an integral part of a county Office of Education program at Marsh Creek in which inmates get vocational high school credit for learning the marketable skill of bicycle repair.
From 30 to 50 inmates per year earn such credit fixing bikes, said Rick Boughton, the wood shop and bicycle repair instructor at Marsh Creek. He said the bikes collected through Cycle Recycle account for 65 to 70 percent of those used in the inmate program.
"It's a huge, huge part of our supply," Boughton said. "Not only do we get good bikes from the Prestons, but we can use parts from the bikes we can't refurbish."
Bicycles donated this season likely will be given out to kids for Christmas 2010, spending the year going through the repair program.
Even if Cycle Recycle isn't a work-intensive program, it has become a well-oiled machine that helps both kids and adults get somewhere in their lives.
"It's certainly a feel-good thing for us, no doubt about that," Tom Preston said.
