Owner of San Jose nonprofit provides free bikes, repairs for people facing challenges

By Carlos E. Castañeda

A San Jose shop owner has discovered that for the unhoused, a bicycle isn’t just a reliable way of getting around; it can be a lifeline for a fresh start.

As a kid, Jim Gardner would take apart a bicycle and put it back together for fun. Today, that skill helps create a cycle of hope.

“I’ve seen magical, magical things happen,” he said.

It all started when Gardner was navigating a rough patch in life. With a physics doctorate and two engineering degrees, he had worked in nanotechnology and even interned at NASA, but he wanted more out of life.

“I was turning 40 and was going oh-for-four in startups,” Gardner explained. “I was having a crisis of conscience, re-evaluating my whole life. And I didn’t think the world was better off that I was in it.”

One day after spotting an unhoused person riding an unsafe bicycle, he decided to pack up his tools in his car. He started fixing bikes for people living at a San Jose park.

And then he noticed that they began to teach others what they learned.

“I had a grandiose notion that this was about public safety and public transportation,” Gardner said. “I learned very much right there with dirty hands that it’s about self-esteem.”

So Gardner started Good Karma Bikes in 2009. It’s a secondhand bicycle shop and nonprofit that has given away more than 12,000 bikes and served more than 63,000 people.

“We want people to utilize us as a way to get ahead in life, to repair their life, to recover from things that they’ve done,” Gardner said.

From its warehouse to its mobile clinics, Good Karma Bikes provides free bicycles and bike repairs for people who are unhoused, in recovery, and earning low wages, plus underserved kids, and San Jose public middle school students who are chronically absent.

Volunteers feel empowered learning to refurbish donated bikes to give away or sell at the shop.

In the early days of the nonprofit, board chair Lorena Collins-Ramirez would invite Gardner to fix bicycles and teach bike repair at homeless shelters she ran.    
                        
“Jim has a great passion. He has a heart of gold,” said Collins-Ramirez.

The work changed many lives.

“It’s taken folks that were in dire straits, and Jim will hire many clients, many people that we’ve served here,” Collins-Ramirez.

People like Danny Campos, who owned a bike shop in Mexico but had a hard time finding a job in the Bay Area until he volunteered at Good Karma Bikes. He was hired last fall.

Campos said he now feels, “Really good. I love this place.”

Campos is now part of a community that works together to build compassion, self-esteem and hope.

“Makes me feel like I’m helping the community,” he said.

Some volunteers who take the nonprofit’s four-week hands-on bike mechanics course called Park Tool School go on to teach or take union jobs in the trades. In another program, women train women in bicycle repair.

For Gardner, Good Karma Bikes is the career shift he needed.

“The thing that drives me the most is leaving the world better off that I was in it,” he said.