People who have spent time in jail can learn how to repair and sell bikes if they get into a cohort program for Community Cycles of California, a San Jose-based non-profit that helps people who typically face barriers to employment develop business skills.
The non-profit gives 10 people who are “justice-involved” the opportunity to learn how to run a business. Many of the participants are also veterans or have been homeless in their past, according to Colin Bruce, who co-founded the non-profit with a friend, Cindy Ahola.
Participants spend about 40% of their time in the classroom completing various workshops and trainings and 60% of their time rotating jobs within the shop, such as marketing, accounting, office management, retail, bike repairs and building bikes.
What’s new about the program, Bruce says, is it’s able to offer a 40-hour work week for the six months it runs. This is different from similar workforce development efforts, which typically offer 20-hour or so gigs or limited services, such as resume help. When Bruce and Ahola first started Community Cycles in 2017, they partnered with outside organizations who had a similar part-time model. But around 80% of participants left the program for full-time jobs.
“These are people that need every penny they can get to keep the roof over their head and pay for food,” he said. “They left to go be short order cooks or a security guard or something like that. And rightly so, because they were working part-time in these programs, they were often, ‘Hey I can’t come in tomorrow, I’ve got to go to my other part-time job.’ They needed two or three part-time jobs just to survive.”
Bruce and Ahola decided to focus the non-profit on bicycles because of his personal passion for bikes. It also gives people who can’t afford a car more independence over their transportation options.
“The first and last mile are critical,” Bruce said. “Just getting to a bus or train or things like that, bikes are one of the best ways to do it. And commuting less than five miles or so is pretty common around the San Jose area.”
Community Cycles was able to fund its cohort members $23 per hour for 40 hours of work in large part because of a grant from the Breaking Barriers to Employment Initiative, a California state program that awards money to help people who face significant barriers to employment, such as those recently out of jail, get jobs.
Breaking Barriers has completed just one round of funding so far and is in the middle of its second round. In the first and second rounds, it has spent about $27 million on 53 organizations, almost all of them community-based, according to Leti Shafer, a manager in the workforce development department of the Foundation for California Community Colleges, who administers the Breaking Barriers grant program.
Other examples of grantees include Homeward Bound of Marin and St. John’s for Real Change, which assist people without housing. These organizations offer support services for participants, such as childcare and job preparation. Homeward Bound also provides six months of employment in different types of businesses, such as how to make and sell dog treats.
Like all grant programs, Breaking Barriers is “as stable as the budget,” Joelle Ball, deputy director of the California Workforce Development Board, said. The initiative “hardly got anything” this past year, for example. Ball said the budget operates on a 10-year cycle, and in years where the California Legislature has more pressing payments, there’s not much money leftover for grants.
“It’s reliant on the Legislature putting that earmark for the program into the budget,” Ball said. “This is how it is for all of our grant programs. “We don’t have any control over it. We can’t lobby, we can’t ask the Legislature for money, we can’t do any of that. What we do advocate for is if you want to put money into workforce programs with us, put it into our programs that exist.”