How a Donated Container Helps Bikes for Kids Wisconsin Make Room

‘Inside the Box’ with Bikes for Kids Wisconsin: flexible on-site storage for bikes, wheelchairs and everything in between.

Jessica Maschek

November 9, 2026

When we came across a social media post from [Bikes for Kids Wisconsin](https://bikesforkidswi.org/) asking for help funding a shipping container, we knew we wanted to help. The organization rehabilitates donated bicycles and gives them away to people facing financial hardship across Dane County and beyond. They needed storage. We had containers. We donated a [20ft WWT (Wind & Watertight) container](https://www.eveoncontainers.com/en-US/used-20ft-shipping-container), and our logistics partner [ISM Global Logistics](https://ism247.com/) delivered it to their shop at no charge. The connection felt fitting. Eveon was founded in the Netherlands, where cycling is not just a hobby or a weekend activity but a primary mode of transportation. Many of our own employees cycle to work. When we saw what Bikes for Kids was doing in Madison, it was an easy donation to make. ## About Bikes for Kids Wisconsin [Bikes for Kids Wisconsin](https://bikesforkidswi.org/) operates out of a 12,000 square foot building in Madison and runs a surprisingly complex operation for a [nonprofit](https://www.eveoncontainers.com/en-US/industries/Used-shipping-containers-for-nonprofit-organizations). All year long, the organization takes in donated bicycles from people who would otherwise have sold them online, left them to gather dust, or sent them to a landfill. Two full-time mechanics triage and rehab the incoming bikes, alongside a steady stream of volunteers who lend their own mechanical skills. The bikes do not all go to the same place. Each spring, Bikes for Kids gives away around 2,000 bikes to people facing financial hardship, distributed through schools, social workers, and community agencies. The giveaway is set up showroom-style, outdoors, so that every recipient can choose a bike in the right size and a color and style they actually like. That’s an important distinction in their charitable work, not just giving the kids bicycles but letting them pick them out themselves. Refurbished bikes are also sold to the public all year round to fund the following year's giveaway. The big bike sale happens in the spring, and sales pick up in the warmer months, given Wisconsin's climate. Some bikes get stripped for parts. Others get shipped overseas to communities in Africa and Central America, where there is a steady need. The organization also takes in things that are not bikes: wheelchairs, knee scooters, recumbent bikes, tandem bicycles, and adult running strollers for people with disabilities. It is, as one team member put it, a bike shop with “very good vibes and a space problem.”

Bikes for Kids employee standing in container

## A Helpful Storage Solution for "Bikes on Bikes on Bikes" The shop's storage situation, before the container, was a constant game of reshuffling. Bikes come in year-round, but the floor plan has to serve different purposes at different times of year: a triage and repair space in the fall and winter, a staging area for 2,000 giveaway bikes in the spring, and a showroom for the spring bike sale and the busier warm-weather months. Converting between those configurations meant moving every bike that was not immediately in use, repeatedly, to make room for whatever was happening next. Linda volunteers at the shop two days a week and has seen the rhythm firsthand. She described a particularly rough conversion during a heat wave, when Ben, one of the shop's mechanics, spent the day hauling and stacking bikes outside in 100-degree heat to clear space for the transition from giveaway season to the warm-weather sales season. Bikes that could not fit inside sat outside, unsecured, vulnerable to theft. Madison being Madison, more bikes tended to show up overnight than went missing, but that was beside the point. "We were rearranging the shop constantly," Linda told us. The low-priority bikes, the oddly shaped items that do not stack nicely, the medical equipment, the tandem bicycles (cursed, apparently, with unsellability) all needed somewhere to live that was not in the way of the work happening that week.

## Out of Sight, Out of the Way The 20ft container now lives on-site at the shop, and the team uses it as flexible dry storage for whatever does not need to be on the shop floor at that given time. Recumbent bikes that are hard to stack. Wheelchairs, knee scooters, and running strollers waiting for the right home. The container holds it all without crowding the shop. "Out of sight, out of mind," said Harvey, the operations manager. "If we don't need to think about this, we don't also have to trip over it." The practical effect is that the team now reshuffles storage three or four times a year instead of constantly. The shop floor is for active work. The container is for everything else, and it adjusts to whatever the current priority might be. If a new grant comes in and the team pivots to converting wheelchairs into adaptive conveyances, those move to the shop and something else goes into the container. It works with the team and the organization's priorities. It also gives Ben his time back. Every hour he spent stacking and rearranging bikes was an hour he was not tuning them. With the extra storage, he gets pulled away from his mechanic work less often and can focus on getting bikes ready to ride.

## A Natural Fit Madison, Wisconsin is a [biking city](https://www.islands.com/1912660/madison-wisconsin-biking-capital-midwest-scenic-trails/). In 2010, the city sent a delegation to the Netherlands to study multimodal commuting, where residents bike to a train station, take the train to work, and bike the last stretch home. The [Rails to Trails](https://www.railstotrails.org/state/wisconsin/) network now runs so extensively through the area that you can ride a protected path all the way to Illinois. It’s a place where bike culture has become a part of everyday life. Eveon was founded in the Netherlands, which has more bicycles than people and treats cycling as infrastructure rather than recreation. We also have a team member from Wisconsin who returns home to visit family every year. When we saw Bikes for Kids fundraising for a container on social media, the connection between what we do and what they do was not hard to see. We reached out to donate the container and our trucking partner, [ISM Global Logistics](https://ism247.com/), kindly delivered it to their shop at no charge. ## Ready for What Comes Next In the meantime, the shop keeps doing what it does: taking in bikes, fixing them up, giving them away. If you are in Madison and you have a bike you no longer need, there is a good chance it has a future. And if Kristie, the executive director, gets another idea, it is probably already on its way to happening.