LaBikery_Interviewraw_audio1818957334
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Robin Puga: Fantastic. All right. Well, I'll just love the beginning here as I usually do, but really glad to have with me on the phone here. We've got Corey Herc, and Corey is from the board of directors of La Baikourie in Moncton, New Brunswick. Thanks for joining us, Cory. 

Cory Herc: Thank you so much for having me. It's a great pleasure to be here. 

Robin Puga: So, I wanted to hear about this organization because it is another bike cooperative, a bike servicing cooperative, but seems to have so much more involved in just being a bike shop. Can you tell us a little bit about LaBikerie and its services? 

Cory Herc: Yeah, absolutely. So Low Bikery is a member based bike co op.

Cory Herc: It's located on the riverfront here in Moncton, New Brunswick, in Signict and Big Moggy. It's been around for a little over 10 years now. We're happy to have celebrated our 10 year anniversary last year, which is really exciting. The core offering at La Bikery is it started off when a group of us had moved back to Moncton after living in some bigger cities, and we had gotten really, really comfortable with the bike co ops in all of those cities, so we wanted to replicate something here that could facilitate access to cycling in a low barrier, low cost way for anybody who lives in Greater Moncton, and Greater Moncton is a Greater Moncton.

Cory Herc: A tri city municipality. So when I say Greater Moncton that refers to Moncton, Dieppe and Riverview, each of which is their own municipal entity but form a little bit of a regional municipality and we serve all of those residents and our mission fundamentally with regards to, to where we are is to make it easy for people to choose cycling as a way to get around.

Cory Herc: And we want that. To be easy in terms of access in terms of costs and in terms of the social barriers or what it's perceived knowledge barriers or communities of belonging. So, to that end, our core offering is we have a shop. It's on the riverfront and that shop allows people to access tools, supplies, parts as well as used bikes.

Cory Herc: At a very, very low cost or free if needed and to try to make that offering as widely available within our community as we can. Very cool. 

Robin Puga: And is Moncton a big cycling community? 

Cory Herc: It's a lot bigger than when we, than when we opened up. So Moncton Moncton itself is one of, one of three cities in New Brunswick.

Cory Herc: New Brunswick, as many of you might know, is not a huge province. The population of New Brunswick as an entire province is smaller than just Ottawa as a city. And so Moncton has in Greater Moncton, has about a hundred and some thousand people. I think the last population count was about 131, 140, maybe, and it sprawls quite a bit. We are built on the edge of a salt marsh. The land is sprawling and fairly flat. And so Moncton, in addition to its geography, was also a transport hub for a long time. It was a major rail transit hub. Its location within three hours drive of most major cities in Atlantic Canada meant that it was a lot of a place for For transit and logistics industries to pass things through so it was very car centric.

Cory Herc: There are a lot of big wide roads that lead you to a lot of places. And a big part of what I say that our mission was to help people choose cycling as a way to get around. What we mean by that is that cycling is a viable way to move, not just in dense urban cores. But through places that are willing to put in that time, that infrastructure, that social support, to make it easy for people to access and maintain their bikes, too.

Cory Herc: So, Monkton, I'm not going to say that it's a cycling hub that you might see, in Copenhagen but we're doing a lot of work to make that more possible, and we have seen huge uptake. LeBikery's membership surpassed a thousand people many of those are regular active cyclists. And for several years we've been doing winter cycling workshops to help people choose it to get around and if you've ever been to New Brunswick in the winter, you know that the winters can be pretty demanding on a cyclist, but those workshops are incredibly well attended and a reliable offering year over year.

Cory Herc: So we're seeing a real groundswell in it compared to compared to years ago when we moved here. It's really exciting to be a part of that. 

Robin Puga: That's awesome. And so you mentioned a thousand members. Is, is this a consumer cooperative? How, how is it structured? 

Cory Herc: Yeah, so we're, we're a small non profit we're largely funded through partnerships and grants.

Cory Herc: And when we were deciding what our model would be, we were looking at ways initially to make that, that point of access low cost but high, high return on social investment. So we're a member co op, and when somebody comes into LaBikeri for the first time, they're given the opportunity to become a lifetime member.

Cory Herc: That lifetime membership is 5. We do have opportunities to waive that fee if somebody doesn't have access to that 5, if they're coming in because they need very, very low cost, low barrier resources. We have some ways to make that happen as well. But that 5 membership gets you in as a member of LaBiker, and that lifetime membership is your, your conventional co op things, and you're able to make nominations, to run for board, to vote at the AGM.

Cory Herc: But we wanted to make sure that lifetime membership came with a sense of agency also. So it's a lot of access based perks in terms of membership events. Our AGMs are our community parties a lot of the time. We do a lot of rides, offerings for skills development, participation, social events for our members.

Cory Herc: And that membership structure is really what we wanted to, to cultivate was when people become a member, they say, yeah, I'm a part of this. I, I have a sense of ownership over this. It's a collective ownership. It's a collective responsibility to do good and to be good to each other. Our staffing is largely grant funded.

Cory Herc: So we're not a workers co op. In the sense that much of our funding for staffing comes through summer student hiring grants. A lot of our shop is staffed by people during the, during the on operating season. And then we have a year round executive director who's really our one core staff. So a worker's co op with one person being a part of the co op wasn't totally the model going into it.

Cory Herc: But I think there's some interesting things there in terms of the long run, but functionally, long story short, members co op with a thousand plus people who have come in and said, yeah, this is something I'm willing to stand behind. 

Robin Puga: Yeah, that's cool. And I noticed on your website as well, you, you have a few different programs that you offer recycling a bike bike lockers, bike tours.

Robin Puga: How does that fit into the rest of the organization? 

Cory Herc: Totally. So our core offering is the shop. And once you're a member, you have access to the shop and you can buy you could buy parts there there are different rates of access to the shop that we can get in. And that was what kept us open for the first several years was mostly volunteers, summer staff, and that notion that if you have a bike that needs a new chain, or you need to get some spare tires, you want to rerun your cables, you can come in and we can help make that happen.

Cory Herc: But after a few years, it becomes very clear that building culture is not a single lane there, there are a lot of divergent paths to take into that. And we're talking about building by culture of envisioning this, this healthy, active and clean community. where cycling connectivity was a big part of it.

Cory Herc: We started looking around and saying, okay, what are the other things? Now that we have that baseline of access to refurbished bikes locked in here, we have maintenance. We started looking at some of the ways that we could build those out. And so the three big ones that we have on the go recycle a bike is our anchor because it builds off of that shop space.

Cory Herc: And that's a way that if somebody comes in and they need a bike and whether, whether it's a question of means, whether it's a question of time, whether it's a question of desire to reinvest in community there's not a lot that we're worried about in terms of criteria, but the recycle bike lets you come in and build sweat equity instead of cash for your bike.

Cory Herc: So you can come in and do some work helping repair other bikes that then we can resell to help keep ourselves afloat whether that's helping out in the shop or whether that's finding other ways to contribute, it allows you to build to build that investment as a member and receive a bike as a thank you.

Cory Herc: And so we do a lot of this work with students with newcomers with individuals who need that affordability barrier brought down for them in a big way. And sometimes with people who just want to come in and sling a wrench for a little bit and say, there's, there's better ways to do this. Let's go.

Cory Herc: And that RecycloBike is one of our core offerings. And when most people think of us in the community, that's the one that comes up most often. I think that's the one that's really built our social offering. But we've also looked around at some of the other needs and bike lockers are one of the ones that emerged out of that.

Cory Herc: And so that's a partnership that we have with with the local business and with the city of Moncton is that we offer low cost lockups for bikes. And so those can be weatherproofing, theft proofing, just a sense of personal agency, somewhere to leave your backpack and your cycling kit if you're riding in from out of town.

Cory Herc: But we have a pro program for those that allow people to access these secure lockups at a very low cost basis throughout the year. And then we also have a bike rental fleet and that bike rental fleet was something that we wanted to offer to make sure that folks, maybe you don't want to spend, some money to buy a full mountain bike.

Cory Herc: Maybe you're only in Moncton for a week but we still want people to be able to choose that. And so that was something that let us get a baseline of financial sustainability over the long haul to, to help make sure that we're not just grant funded. And to offer low cost, high flexibility rentals.

Cory Herc: So we can do hourly, half days, days, and that started to build out into programming. So one of the programs that we have, for example, is with a local watershed group to offer eco tours of the riverfront that we're on. We've done some partnerships with the university and some just recreational touring for individuals who want to pick up some bike packing skills who are interested in taking a little overnight or out of town.

Cory Herc: But might not be ready to, to jump over the spandex barrier and get into, into some of the higher, some of the higher end cycling gear can feel psychologically intimidating. And fundamentally making sure that those offerings for bike touring can feel like a little bit of an everybody can join, everybody can, can take part.

Cory Herc: And so a rental fleet, something that we're actually hoping to build out a little bit more and to build some accessibility angles on that as well. Looking at e bikes, looking at different styles of bikes. Right now we just have simple cruisers. We want something that was. Low, low learning curve.

Cory Herc: Everyone's seen an old cruiser style bike that have been around for the last century, but we're interested in building those out because ebikes can be a huge, huge accessibility meditator too. And we'd love to find ways that we can do that. And some of the other things we actually have a partnership with CNIB.

Cory Herc: We have a tandem bike that is available so that clients at the CNIB can go out with somebody who can offer as a visual guide steering the bike while they get up for a ride. So these partnerships have taken a lot of different ways, but a lot of when we talk about bike tours is not, come pay 2, 000 and we'll go take you on a three day tour of all, all the local vineyards kind of thing.

Cory Herc: It's more of a how do we, how do we get people to experience the things that you might otherwise never experience and to be able to choose to say yes to that again. 

Robin Puga: So, I mean, you're, you're really speaking to this differentiation of la Bikery compared to a lot of bike shops out there in the world.

Robin Puga: And, and even by cooperatives that we've talked to before on each for all. It really seems that the, the thrust here, the, the whole reason for being is around this social inclusion, this, this connection with your community and, and community building. And yeah, like, it sounds like all the way back to the beginning.

Robin Puga: Can you tell us like you, you mentioned a little bit about the different people who came together here. But how did you all coalesce and come together then to decide that, this is how you're going to change your community? For the better. 

Cory Herc: Yeah. I mean, I think one of the big things that we've seen, especially over the last few years was that realization that community and human connection is one of the crucial things that keeps us feeling good about life.

Cory Herc: And if there's anything that we've learned, over the pandemic, over the lockdowns is that You can't ignore the desire that people have to do something together that that's a fundamental part of what bonds us in community is common interest, common goals and common, common achievement of those goals together that when we work together on something, it feels good when we look at that and say, Hey, yeah, we did this.

Cory Herc: That's like, that's rewarding. It's validating. And it makes us want to stay invested in our communities and in each other. And so, This started when a few of us had all moved back to month and around at the same time, I moved back here in 2011 and had linked up with a couple of other people who were having those same conversations after living in bigger cities, Montreal Ottawa, Vancouver Toronto, all cities where even though they might be bigger, they might have a lot more transit.

Cory Herc: From the other ways, they all had something that let people choose cycling a little more easily. And a lot of those were bike co ops or community bike shops, whether they're actual cooperatives or not is beside the point, but those community scale street level access points And so I connected with a few, a few people already having those conversations.

Cory Herc: Joanna, Guy, Chrissy, and Amanda initially came up in that way, and as we started talking more and more about that, we looked around and said, well, we can do it here. Why couldn't we do this here? At the time that I moved back, vacancy rates are exceptionally high in Moncton. There's a lot of empty real estate that we could have looked at.

Cory Herc: Yeah. And so we decided that a cooperative was the right way to do it, not just in name, that a lot of bike co ops might not necessarily have incorporation as a co op, but we said that's it, that's that structure of belonging is critical. That belonging to something and saying, yes, this is a thing that I care about, not just a thing that I do it feels good.

Cory Herc: So we wanted to make sure our corporate structure by incorporating as a co op matched that social inclusion goal that we said. If the resources that support me are here, then I feel like I belong. And we want to say, well, let's make that for everybody. Then we want. Anybody who takes part to be able to capture that experience of this is a thing that serves you and makes it easy for you to choose to be here.

Cory Herc: So that's when we started. We wanted something that was bilingual. Moncton is very bilingual. Moi je parle français aussi. Alors nous avons choisi la bikerie coopérative. Because we wanted a name that felt good in both English and French. We wanted a name that could go easily through our incredibly bilingual community.

Cory Herc: And we spent quite a long time talking to our peers to make sure that we weren't just imposing, this, we all just moved back home after some time in the big city and here's what we're going to do. And so we spent a long time building those partnerships and that's the thing that came up over and over was partnerships and relationships make action happen.

Cory Herc: Cooperatives are about going further together. And that. Really cemented it. And I think over the last 10 years, over the multiple strategic plans we've done over that time, over the many executive directors we've had over that time, partnership development and community engagement just keep coming up over and over and over that if we're going to keep this going, um, alone, we go fast together, we go far and we want to go far.

Cory Herc: Well, I'm really that worried about going fast. 

Robin Puga: Well, that's why we're on bikes, right? Right. Yeah. So this must have taken a fair amount of effort and coordination from your initial gatherings and discussions. A lot of sweat equity, I'm guessing, went into this. 

Cory Herc: Yeah, our board was incredibly operational for those first few years.

Cory Herc: And we had a lot of desire to do that, when you're looking at our initial board, we had so many different angles of community building skills represented. We had folks who were involved in, rural municipal politics. We had folks who were educators, folks who are community developers.

Cory Herc: We were incredibly blessed to have somebody who worked actually for the Cooperative Enterprise Council of New Brunswick on our board at the time, who knew the ins and outs of getting a co op itself off the ground. But our board was slugging it out. We were there with grease on our hands when the shop was open.

Cory Herc: We had gone through several changes of paints, of paint stand flows, getting the shop set up, painting the walls fitting all over the place. And, And so our board was Really deeply, deeply boots on the ground. And volunteer engagement was our biggest way to get going before we even had full time staff.

Cory Herc: We had our board, constantly in their inbox, sending out volunteer coordination messages, opening up the shop, bringing people in for those, two days a week that we were open in the beginning. The sweat equity runs pretty deep in my case, I had a trajectory coming into it where I was volunteering quite a bit with the bike co op in Guelph, Ontario, where I was living before I came back to Moncton.

Cory Herc: So, for me, that operational involvement felt really good, especially after volunteering quite a bit, turning a wrench, and then later on actually going back to Guelph to do a bike mechanic certification that's a partnership between the Winterbourne Institute and Conestoga College. So for me, that's what equity was where I wanted to be.

Cory Herc: Bridging that space between working with my hands and developing my community with relationships just hit all the right notes. But since then, we do, we have proudly moved ourselves into more of a conventional governance board. Our board is not in the shop, getting our hands dirty every single week, even though a lot of our board members volunteer or bike or get engaged in other ways.

Cory Herc: We've done a really good job of reinforcing it with it's really, really high quality skills in our executive director with some of the consulting team that supports us with our volunteers and with our shop staff that we hire every summer. But that's what equity was there. I think if you were to tally up the amount of volunteer hours that got contributed to a bike just in its 1st year, you'd be well into the thousands.

Robin Puga: Wow. And you did mention earlier grants play a big factor in some of your funding here. So, what kind of grants and like for what purposes and how does that kind of dovetail with trying to have a Profitable business. 

Cory Herc: Yeah, so I mean one thing as a co op, we are also incorporated as a non profit. We're not a for profit co op.

Cory Herc: So we're not as worried about profitability. We are worried about making sure that we could stay, stay on mandate. So Our initial partnership with the city of Monkton is something that we're, we're incredibly fortunate to have is our relationship with the city of Monkton is a lot of let us access things both through their conventional grant streams through their major multi year funding agreements that they have, and those are open to community serving agencies throughout the area.

Cory Herc: On an annual basis, we tap into that through the standard channel, but we've also worked a little bit with them as far as space. And there's a fire hall on the riverfront. That's a municipally owned building. It hasn't been a fire hall for an incredibly long time. It's mostly used for municipal ops now.

Cory Herc: So if you go into the summer, it's pickup trucks, six wheeler gators, and a lot of the, a lot of the folks who maintain the riverfront operate out of there. We were able to operate out of that as well. So we have a really, really great agreement with the city that lets us access this absolutely phenomenal space.

Cory Herc: With shop flooring and big windows, which is a tough combo to find. It's, it's bright. It's well maintained. There are year round occupancy through the municipal operations folks as well. So, even when we're not there, we're not worried about leaving a place totally empty. And that partnership with the city was what really let us anchor something and to take that 1st hit of mission delivery and say, okay, are we creating a conditions for people in greater month and to choose cycling as a way to get around?

Cory Herc: Yes. All right, let's go. And then from there, we received some other funding. There is a a provincially administered grant called the the ETF, the environmental trust funds that we access regularly. And that helps anchor a lot of things like our RecycloBike program. That's a grant that requires you to do something a little different every year.

Cory Herc: So they don't fund recurring programming. So that's a big part of our expansion has usually been driven by. That needs a provincial funder that says, what else can you do? What else can you do? And we're saying, well, that's an endless list when you're when you're a little bike co op in a growing city.

Cory Herc: And then we've received some other support. We have some, some in kind partnerships. We have incredibly strong relationships with our local bike shops, which has been a real treat. And we've benefited a little bit from some of the community service recovery funds as well. Some of the COVID recovery funding that was out there.

Cory Herc: Because those placemaking needs, those poverty, poverty reduction and cost mitigation things that we offer by helping people get around in the city that really sprawls. A lot of our members talk about the way that social inclusion isn't just about belonging to something, but being able to participate in your city as well.

Cory Herc: Being able to move yourself easily to, to work, to leisure, to joy or just to the places that you need to be. And we're mucked in, as a, as a transit hub. And as a lot of people knows, it's a very historically blue collar, very historically working class province. And in a city that sprawls that's growing very, very rapidly and that has a lot of working people being able to get around is a really critical part of it.

Cory Herc: Buses play a role. We love we love collaborating on multimodal transport. We have a really good relationship with the transit authority here. But bikes play a role for that, too. And so that's one of the big things that we found, especially over the lockdowns. And especially now, as we're going into, some big shifts globally, economically, climatically, all of these different factors we're saying it is, Bikes aren't a silver bullet.

Cory Herc: We're not going to solve every single problem in the world by saying, here's two wheels that are not for everybody, but they can make a big dent. And so we've been able to access some funding through partners and organizations like that. And then a few of our basic ops that the tours the bike locker rentals and refurbishing and reselling bikes affordably.

Cory Herc: They're not, they're not a business model. That's going to carry anyone into the multimillions. But they keep the door, they keep the doors open. They keep the lights on and they keep our executive director engaged and moving forward, which is really what we're looking to get is as a mission driven organization.

Cory Herc: It always comes back to how do we fulfill that mission in a way that keeps us going, keeps our community going. Well, I mean, it 

Robin Puga: sounds like the potential to have big impact here in your community is there and from what you were saying connecting with people who, are economically challenged with newcomer communities there's a lot of impact.

Robin Puga: It sounds like La Baiqueria is making here. 

Cory Herc: Yeah, and I think that's something that we see over and over again is people who have nothing to do with cycling looking to us and saying, we'd like to partner because there's something there. It's, it's a tool that enables people to move other things like forward in their lives.

Cory Herc: And that's really it, is when you look at these different intersections, we collaborate with newcomers agencies, we collaborate with youth drop in centers, with high schools, we collaborate with different municipalities, in addition to the obvious things like waste reduction, environmental agencies, the tourism work.

Cory Herc: There's a lot of question of who else, who else can get involved, and it's something that we see especially with a lot of the newcomer agencies in town who we work with. We say it's A huge overlap of people who move to Moncton and say, how can I get around? How can I learn, what's in my community?

Cory Herc: And especially in the summer when cycling season into Brunswick is good, it's not as joyful out there to ride a bike in February. Sometimes we're seeing a lot of different overlaps with a lot of different communities that make up our city and saying, okay, well, how else do we, how else can we play?

Cory Herc: How else can we move this forward? How can we empower, our community to make other choices that are pro social and good in their lives too. 

Robin Puga: And so, for others who are interested in starting a similar organization in their communities what would be your insights here, pearls of wisdom to share with those who are just getting started?

Cory Herc: Yeah, I mean, I think this is the big one, is we take it back when I said that alone you can go fast, but together you go much further. It's a little slower to do that, but to take your time, that the slow route is often the one that gets you there, and we've had parables and fairy tales and stories that without saying moral for our entire lives, that's not new news.

Cory Herc: But they're finding that balance between the bias to action. The saying, well, let's just get out there and do it now is really, really exciting. But we really took our time. We made sure that we had a solid governance structure that we could communicate our mission, but our mission and vision were really, really.

Cory Herc: Something that our community wanted to believe in and we're just something that we believed in, but that we built a system that could enable us eventually to transition out as board members and just become regular role members of the bakery and know that the community would still hold that mission that its governance structure was solid that our partners saw themselves reflected in a long time.

Cory Herc: And I think that's a really important part for a community co op that's made of a membership that lives in that community is that we could have had the best idea in the world, but if we didn't make sure that the other that our neighbors and that our community members and those who are becoming our neighbors, in those years, even if we didn't make sure they wanted to hold it, then our succession when our board mandates ran out, it could have really looked like a fizzling spark rather than than something that warmed up our community for a long time.

Cory Herc: And I think It's tough to have a good idea and to say I'm going to spend the whole year just thinking about this idea and making sure that it's right, but I think that foundation that we built together, that go slow art really, really made sure we could go much further. And it's something that's tough and coming from a background of, doing more, more scrappy grassroots activism and community organizing, especially, it's like, wow, we're really taking our time with this and I learned so much in that first year.

Cory Herc: That I still carry with me today, 11 years later but I think that was the biggest thing was we, we made a foundation that still persists and that bringing all those different. Perspectives and skills bases on community organizing brought us to something that's incredibly resilient. After some time away from the board, I recently rejoined the board just a couple of years ago, and I didn't have to get, I had to familiarize myself with all the new programs, all the new documents that were created, all the terms of reference.

Cory Herc: But also when I stepped back into that board after years away, it still was like, oh yeah, this is definitely the organization that I recognize. Like that foundation was still deeply apparent. Even after multiple executive directors, multiple boards and an enormous growth in our membership that that foundation is still incredibly apparent.

Cory Herc: And you can see that when it comes in. And many of those initial partner organizations are still there. A lot of those relationships that were built in year 1 and year 2 are still present and that continuity and consistency, you can't put a price on that. That's. We live on in our communities through the relationships we hold in them, and if you make sure those are good, you're going to go on forever.

Cory Herc: Fantastic. 

Robin Puga: And I love that yeah, the way you describe the process of setting your mission and vision and taking the time to really, like, make sure that you were articulating this. In a way that would carry forward beyond that initial group. That, that's really fantastic. It does lay that foundation, like you mentioned.

Robin Puga: We should probably get to wrap it up here, but I did want to congratulate you on the 10 years. I mean, that's, that's a, that's great for an organization to, to, that's a great marker. So congratulations. And I am curious to hear what do you ride? 

Cory Herc: Yeah, I mean, that's a really, really great question.

Cory Herc: So Over the course of my life, I've ridden a lot of bikes. Backroads touring is really what sparks my fire. New Brunswick has a lot of backroads. You've got a lot of ATV trails and long roads. And as I get a little bit older my, my mountain biking and road biking have fallen off a little bit.

Cory Herc: I like the quiet of the backroads and the gravel. So I do a lot of gravel biking, but my daily is a single speed surly steam roller and it was gifted to me by, by a friend It was a part of his estate after he passed it was somebody who did more work than I can ever imagine bringing cycling culture in here, and he was a mechanic, who I love deeply, Richard Dunnevin.

Cory Herc: And so I ride his old bike every day, and it was something that his sister offered to me after he passed, and that's my That's my everyday one and it was built by him to ride in the streets in downtown Moncton. And so when I commute, when I go get groceries, when I visit my friends by bike, I try to make sure that I'm riding it all the time because It was built here for here.

Cory Herc: I'd love to ride it here. Awesome. 

Robin Puga: Well, thanks for sharing. That sounds like a really fun way to get around Moncton. 

Cory Herc: It's a hoot. I mean, we're lucky that the city's quite flat, so a single speed is a viable one here. Low in the maintenance, high in the fun. 

Robin Puga: All right. Well, thank you so much, Corey. Really appreciate you sharing the story of Love by Corry.

Robin Puga: And we'll look forward to sharing this with our listeners. 

Cory Herc: Thank you so much for having me on here, Robin. It was a real treat.