Sarthak Prasad met with Lisa Lillig at KCPA on November 21, 2019. Following are the meeting notes.

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I met with Lisa yesterday (November 21, 2019) at the KCPA lobby to discuss holding this event at KCPA. I was under the impression that it would be just for KCPA employees, and not that we will hold this event at KCPA for anybody who was interested.

Lisa said that she had spoken to the management at KCPA, and they do not think that their employees would be interested in this program. She said that there are 85 employees, and they have meetings with production, their team meetings, management meetings, and that they would not be willing to wait 30 minutes to get to their meetings using the bus. I tried to explain that it doesn’t take that long for the buses, and that it is much the better option for the environment. However, she was not interested.

She said that their employees often work 12 hour shifts and they would not want to wait another 30 minutes to get to their homes. She said that the employees usually park in the parking lot below, and they use the permits (I didn’t force the fact that they may want to save the permit fee, if they parked at the periphery of the campus and took the bus from there). Their employees usually have late night shifts as well, and I told her about the SafeRide program (she said that she knew about it).

Finally, she said that a 30-minute presentation and a 30-minute demonstration of how to ride a bus, is a lot of time. She suggested that we should do the presentation while in the bus, to which I explained why it would not be effective. However, she still maintained that 1-hour is a lot of time to invest (and said that I can do a lot of work in 1 hour) for this program.

Lisa suggested that I talk to Renee Laeyll from Employee Development and Learning, and include this in their program. She also suggested that I should contact the Department of Theatre (Cathy Feely) and Department of Dance (Ana Sapozhnikov) to see if their student, faculty, or staff would be interested in this program. Finally, she suggested that I contact LAS and Engineering to see if I could get a table during the Welcome Week at KCPA (as they hold the Undergrad Convocation at KCPA).

Overall, KCPA was not interested in holding this event, although I did not have the correct information about the program.

Thank you,

Sarthak

All, Last week was a big press week. We landed on the cover of the Daily Illini on Thursday and then when we did our shipping event on Friday with Working Bikes WCIA showed up!  https://www.wcia.com/news/bike-project-helps-people-in-need/

Good press all around!

The shipping event went just about as well as it’s ever gone in my tenure. To start we had 200 fewer bikes to deal with, then Working Bikes provided twice as many staff as they have before, and to cap it off we had good turnout between my staff and volunteers. Unfortunately, volunteer and staff availability isn’t something I can count on every year.  

For this week, today and tomorrow we’ll have LAS students in to volunteer. Other than that, it’s business as usual. We’re getting into finer and finer details of culling and organizing, getting into some deep cleaning, which I regret isn’t my strong suit but man does it make a difference. Next week we’ll be closed for Thanksgiving break.
Also, a big thanks to Todd for grabbing scrap over the weekend.

The numbers:

Visitors: 40
Sales: $527
Bike (refurb): 1 or $150
Bike (B-a-B): 1 for $80
Memberships: 2 for $60
Tires/tubes: 10 for $53
Thanks!

Jacob Benjamin
Manager, Campus Bike Center

The Flagg Hall location was approved by the Architecture Review Committee (ARC) in November 2019.

Please see the numbers below for the month of October 2019. ~400 e-bikes and ~75 pedal bikes

October:

Total Rides – 37,443

• Peddle Bike – 3,677
• E-bike – 33,766

Total Users gained – 1,281

Average Ride Time – 8.76 Minutes

Overall:

Total Rides: 375,147

Total Users:19,749

Reporting:

• We received 5 reports to remove bikes from private property
• We received 10 calls about bikes parked inappropriately

Events: We were a sponsor for the Aruna 5k on Oct 26th. We provided 250 coupons good for $2 of ride credits

Reached out to Sam Smith and Lisa Lillig at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts (KCPA). Informed them about the event, and requested a meeting to discuss the event in more details. This event was planned to be open for faculty, staff, and students. The event was planned to be held at the end of November and first week of December.

All, We’ve slowed down enough to offer the First Visit Free option again, which has its plusses and minuses but is at least consistent with our website/literature on the topic.

Last week we had our Bike Maintenance 101 class. Three attendees came, despite the cold and rain, so that was awesome. I think all of them had issues with their own bikes that precipitated their interest in the class and two of them said they’d be back to fix their bikes. A success!
One bike was on the donation rack this morning. Another small bike but of good quality that’ll hopefully fix up quickly.
I got in touch with someone from the Fine and Applied Arts to see if there’s any interest in using some of our scrap metal to keep it out of the dump but that was a dead end. I’ll still try to think of ways to keep our scrap pile a little smaller since we’re frequently at-or-beyond capacity. I think overall, we don’t have enough venues through which to repurpose a bicycle beyond B-a-B and Shop Builds. Something to think about.
This week if we’re slow I’ll have the student staff do a deep dive on our used parts inventory to get a better picture of just how many bike parts we’re storing here. Additionally, we have our What to Wear info session at ARC on Thursday evening from 7 – 8p.

The numbers:
Visitors: 82
Sales: $677.75
Memberships: 14 for $420
Tire/tubes: 14 for $79

Thanks!

Jacob Benjamin
Manager, Campus Bike Center

Tristan Pisarczyk connected Sarthak Prasad with Jenna Fesemyer, the Resident Director, at Newman Hall. Jenna said that she does not believe that this is a service that their residents need. She said that this program would serve better towards the beginning of the school year.

Jenna suggested that we should wait for the next academic year to put on a program during an earlier time.

Please see attached the list of avenues used to promote Light the Night event.