Comment on Trips for Kids gives city kids a ride out of town

Three decades after that hilltop moment, Price heads Trips for Kids, an organization she founded that has given thousands of kids their first outdoor biking experience. The Marin chapter alone has taken more than 20,000 teenagers on rides in the Bay Area and taught many of them bicycle maintenance and customer-service skills at the organization’s flagship Re-Cyclery thrift shop in San Rafael. Price fell in love with biking in the Bay Area when she moved to San Francisco at 25, after graduating from the University of Michigan with a degree in sociology. Price ran the group from her home for a decade, with help from volunteers who drove kids to and from outings. The shop, run by paid and volunteer staff, is a colorful trove of vintage bike frames, donated clothing and dozens of bins packed with bike components — derailleurs, brakes, chain rings, wheels and handlebars. In 1996, Price was inducted into the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame. Since 1999, Trips for Kids’ financial success has allowed it to open new chapters, in the U.S., Canada, Israel and Sierra Leone. Some of the young people who have taken part in Trips for Kids credit the group for changing their lives. A year ago, his employer sent him to a bike mechanic skills course at Specialized, the global bike company in Morgan Hill. At the Trips for Kids warehouse on a late-August morning, Byron Gomez, 18 (no relation to Cesar) trained aspiring young bike mechanics.