‘WE’RE DOING THIS TO BUILD RELATIONSHIPS’

mechanic and learned how to repair bikes and build them from scratch. Made created a curriculum for school workshops. Subhani found graphic designers to make flyers and T-shirts, and reached out to other community groups to collaborate.

Word spread. Strangers donated bikes. The women, who are all 22, recruited a dozen volunteers and began hosting learnto-ride lessons in Military Park and evening tours that favored conversation over competition. A mission emerged.

“We wanted to create a sisterhood,” La Fortune Reed said. “We go really slow. We have fun. We’re doing this to build relationships, to build a movement.”

The outreach caught the community’s attention and so did the riders. Members eschew cycling gear in favor of celebrating their own styles, which can range from vintage fur coats and rainbow platforms to sweatpants and Timberland boots. When they ride together, they’re hard to miss.

“We’re breaking the stigma and norm of who a female rider is supposed to be,” Subhani said. “We want people to feel comfortable in their own skin.”

Leigh Ann Von Hagen, a senior researcher at the Alan M. Voohrees Transportation Center at Rutgers University, which has studied bicycling behavior and habits among children, praised Girls on Bikes’ efforts to build community.

“What can happen is a self-perpetuating cycle: If the number of women is much lower than men, if you’re not seeing role models, if you’re not seeing someone who looks like you, cycling is not going to be appealing to you,” she said. “But these kinds of groups, where you have the role models and it’s social and it’s fun, that can change the culture.”

La Fortune Reed said Girls on Bikes tries especially hard to reach girls in middle school.

“We try to catch them at that age, to build up bicycling and the idea of empowerment and leadership, before peer pressure hits,” she said.

In June, the group taught a four-week workshop for sixth- through eighth-grade girls at Marion P. Thomas Charter School. Cortnee Love, the math teacher who arranged the visit, said all the students wanted to ride by the end of the month.

“Before, there was a negative connotation for a lot of them — this idea that if you rode a bike, it meant you couldn’t afford a car, that you weren’t cool,” Love said. “But having that reimagined by these strong, stylish young women, the students really bought into it.”

Newark is undergoing a burgeoning cycling scene. Newark Community Cycling Center recently opened at Rector Street and Park Place, providing a bike shop within city borders. The Brick City Bike Collective, a nonprofit advocacy group, has relaunched the Newark Bike Tour, a 16-mile ride through the city. Last year, the biannual Newark Historical Renaissance Ride debuted; in June, organizers tapped Girls on Bikes to lead its seersucker-themed ride.

Girls on Bikes is growing, too, hosting rides for Newark First Fridays, an arts and food festival, and participating in city camp programs. Subhani, a senior at Rutgers-newark, is preparing an application for nonprofit status; Made, who begins a joint master’s and law degree in public administration at Rutgers-newark this month, is scheduling school workshops for the fall; and La Fortune Reed, who graduated in 2017 and is now a data analyst, is planning a Girls on Bikes block party to introduce the group to the city’s West Ward area.

At the Lincoln Park clinic, the young women took turns wiping down handlebars and monitoring the line of impatient riders. Though they’d brought 10 bikes, the midsize ones were in heavy rotation.

More than 80 children participated throughout the weekend. Some didn’t need any help, just a nudge to put on helmets. Simply watching them enjoy the bicycles made La Fortune Reed happy.

But the moments when she saw girls growing in their confidence — testing out no-hands, standing on their pedals, letting go of training wheels — meant something more. “We’re leaving a memory in their lives that they can accomplish anything,” she said.

When Kaneisha Marable realized she was riding on her own, she looked back at La Fortune Reed, astonished. She rode and rode and then ran off, returning a few minutes later with her mother. She climbed back on the bicycle.

“Look, Mommy, look! Look what I learned to do!”