What Does Biking Mean To You?

Hi I’m Stephanie Orlando, I’m the executive director of Charlie’s Freewheels. I have been riding my bike in the city for over a decade, I’ve been working on my bike in community spaces for just as long and I currently work at Charlie’s Freewheels where I teach youth age 12 to 25 how to build and maintain their own bikes.

To me cycling means having autonomy over how I navigate the city, how I get around, where I go and when I get there.

How do you think your connection to cycling has grown or evolved over the years?

I think some cycling was something that really helped me find my own place in the city when I moved here. I used to take my bike to DIY spaces to learn how to fix it and that made me love riding my bike even more. I felt more confident that if something ever went wrong I knew people could help me fix it but I also really loved how accessible it was to get into riding bikes and fixing bikes especially for someone like me who never really had experience with using tools or fixing things just discovering that anyone can learn how to work on bikes.  

Over the years, since I’ve started working at Charlie’s Freewheels, the way that it’s grown my connection to cycling has grown. Now, I get to be the one that gets to foster that love of cycling in youth and help them also learn that you don’t have to be an expert to do this you get to just try anyway and they always feel like if something goes wrong on their bike they know people who can help them fix it. I feel like I have come full circle with doing that and I also like that you know I can pass on  these nice memories that I had when I was younger to the next generation.

What is Your Favourite Place To Ride?

The Leslie Split! I like bird watching, and there’s so many cool birds you can see down there. It is also one of those places that is really inconvenient to get to with other modes of transportation. You can’t drive cars in there, you can’t take the TTC there, and you can walk there but it would take a couple hours to get to the end of the peninsula. But on your bike you can get there so fast, you can get to the end in 10-15 minutes and it’s just a nice place to go and forget for a while that you’re in a city.  

Tell us about your bike!

I got my bike back when I was a volunteer at Charlie’s Freewheels from here, and I love it because I built it myself. I got to customize it the way that I like it and also it’s pink and yellow which for me as a person who doesn’t really wear colors, I only wear like black and earth tones ’cause you know I work in a bike shop, so having this really colorful bike it just feels so not me or like out of character but also I love that cause I can contain multitudes.

What has been your all time favourite cycling adventure?

My all time favourite biking adventure was earlier this year I was travelling in Japan. I met up with a friend, and also volunteer at Charlie’s Freewheels, named Christina and we travelled to Kyoto together and rented a tandem bike. We spent two days just riding this tandem bike all around the city and it was honestly so magical. We rode around rivers to castles and gardens and temples and it was just awesome. In Kyoto everything is so small, and there are all these alleyways that are perfect for bikes to go down. She sat in the front, I sat in the back and navigated us, and it was the best.

Can you tell us a bit about the cycling advocacy work you’re doing right now in the community?

At Charlie’s Freewheels I always say that we do cycling advocacy through our actions more so than with our words. Since we started 16 years ago we have literally provided thousands of youth with free bicycles, we’ve taught them how to maintain them themselves, and how to ride them safely, and just getting more people on the road as a result is part of our whole mission here as well; to create a bike shop that feels safe and welcoming for all.

We recognize that the cycling industry historically has been dominated by cisgender white men and we want to challenge that through the way that we run our space and the things that we do here.

We want to make a space where everyone feels welcome regardless of their background or their skills. We also run classes specifically for women, trans, non-binary, and queer youth on bike mechanics to create a space for those who maybe have felt discouraged from learning bicycle mechanics, or intimidated in traditional bike shop settings. We have instructors that lead these classes that themselves share these identities just to show that you know there’s all kinds of different people who work on bikes and even in the bigger picture we wanna make working on bikes as accessible as we can just to teach young people that you don’t have to look a certain way or come from a certain background or have a certain set of skills. Literally anyone can learn to work on a bike

What is your favourite detail, or details, on your bike?