For 12 years, Bike Club has taught thousands of Tulsa Public Schools students life and cycling skills after school. Now it is expanding that effort with a nearly $8 million headquarters set to open in January — and bringing a much needed community space to west Tulsa.
The roughly 14,000-square-foot facility, located near Bales Park at 58th and Union, has been years in the making.
“This is the house that Bike Club built,” said program director and co-founder Mike Wozniak.
Wozniak founded the bicycle-themed-bar Soundpony in 2006 to “change the world” by getting people on bikes. He found a quick ally in Jason Whorton, who had been donating bikes to Tulsa kids since 2008 through his nonprofit Humble Sons.
Building confidence for kids
Together, they opened the first Bike Club at Emerson Elementary in 2014. That has since expanded to 37 TPS schools, getting nearly 700 students on bikes last year.
Bike Club runs September through May, offering weekly volunteer-led meetings for fourth through eighth graders. Students learn the basics of cycling and other skills like confidence, listening and teamwork.
As students approach the end of the fall semester, they begin biking off-campus. Celia Clinton Elementary’s club surpassed expectations this fall on their first expedition into their east Tulsa neighborhood. The pack dutifully alerted each other to passing cars and waved at dogs and neighbors watching from their yards.
Getting steadier throughout the ride, they kept pedaling and giggling, even as some fell out of formation or struggled to use their hand breaks. Next week, they may ride out for ice cream.
Humble Sons has given thousands of bikes to students after they’ve completed a year in Bike Club and hopes to continue for this year’s participants.
Bike Club’s annual impact reports regularly show students feel calmer and more confident after participating, a sentiment shared by the adult volunteers. After 12 years of consistently seeing positive results from participants, Wozniak says the nonprofit’s relationship with the community is “really strong” and worth building on.
Turning a headquarters into a home
“For (Bike Club), it was about having a home,” said Shane Hood of Align Design, the architect on the project. “They’ve always been a very big part of the community, but they’ve never had a physical space where they could create that community.”
About a dozen donors each gave at least $100,000 to support the HQ project, and Wozniak’s own family pulled together $20,000 for the build.
Bike Club hopes building in Bales Park will bring more activity to a long underutilized green space in west Tulsa.
The nonprofit partnered with the City of Tulsa and Tulsa Housing Authority in 2022 to bring new trails to the park. When Hood and Whorton started scouting for the HQ’s location, the “urban forest” around the trail seemed like the perfect location for a modern community hub built to last. Rock formations on the trails even inspired Hood’s design of oxidized metal jutting into the sky.
Every aspect of the headquarters is “purpose-built,” Wozniak says.
Glass garage doors frame both sides of the building’s central pavilion, so visitors can bike straight through and onto the trail. Drains line the floor of the hanger so staff can easily hose down the hundreds of bikes to be stored inside.
A kitchen adjoins the back patio, providing a permanent home for volunteer cookouts and a new space for community events. Classroom spaces open up the possibility of Tulsa Public Schools site visits or even field trips.
“There’s not really a space like that in the bike and youth programming space,” said Emily Adamic, Bike Club’s director of programs and research. “I think it’s a really amazing, like, launchpad for us moving forward.”
The nonprofit plans to first open the headquarters to the public on the weekends and slowly test out hosting events with a few volunteer cookouts or small gatherings.
“I kind of think of it as an embassy, like a Tulsa Bike Embassy almost,” Wozniak said. “We have a big cycling community, so why not have a place where we can meet?”
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