Danville Student Goes For Eagle With Adopt a Family Bikes

San Ramon Valley High sophomore Ryan Mahoney is seeing the culmination of three years of planning for his Eagle Scout project.

The teen is volunteering with Adopt a Family Bikes, an organization that repairs donated bicycles and gives them to charities that redistribute the bikes to people in need.

Donating his winter weekends since he was 8 years old, Mahoney has grown up with the organization.

“My dad found an announcement in the church and decided to bring me along one night,” he said. “The next year I started repairing the bikes myself.”

The road to this project has not been completely smooth. Mahoney has been thinking about his Eagle badge for the past three years and has run into several roadblocks.

“The first time I wrote the project it didn’t get approved. Last year, I re-wrote the proposal that included my plans, my necessary materials, and the tools. Then I had to get it accepted by my advisor, my scout master, and the district representatives,” he said.

After getting the project approved, the scout had to put it on hold because of the football season, getting sick and school commitments. He wrote the project again this summer and fall, and it was approved in October.

The amount of people and organization that goes into this project make Mahoney’s work all the more impressive.

The first step is community members dropping off their bikes at the Danville location. Next, volunteers repair the bikes to get them ride-able. Charity organizations then pick up the bikes and give them to people in need.

But as his father, Rand Mahoney, spins a badly bent front wheel, he explains that some of the repairs are even too much for the skilled volunteers.

“If the volunteers cannot repair the bikes, they either take components from them to use on other bikes or send the bikes to Pacific Rim Recycling where they get recycled or sent to South America to be repaired and donated there,” he said. “Everything gets used in one way or another.”

According to the older Mahoney, this project was started nine years ago at St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church by two cub scout packs that ran a bike drive at several Danville schools. The project grew through word-of-mouth to the point where now 30 to 40 people volunteer annually and roughly 250 bikes are donated per year.

The bikes will be given to the Monument Crisis Center, the Salvation Army, Options Recovery Services, Grant Elementary School, Richmond High School, Fresh Start and Contra Costa Interfaith Housing.

Bike donations will be accepted every Saturday and Sunday through the end of December from noon to 4 p.m. at 740 Camino Ramon in Danville.