A group of Newburgh community members are collecting and donating bikes for asylum seekers in that city.

Damian Depauw, executive director of Impact Inc., opened his bike collecting business in 2018 and when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, things got busy.

“People really needed bikes, there was a bike shortage and people needed ways of utilizing transportation outside of the public transit system,” said Depauw.

Depauw collects bikes from around the Hudson Valley.

“We collect donated and discarded bicycles, fix them up and get them in good working condition, and then donate them back out to people in the community who may need them. Or we sell them for a small fee to try to cover the costs of buying new port parts and, you know, tools and so on and so forth,” said Depauw.

Depauw recently connected with Orange County Legislator Kevindaryan Lujan, who has been working with asylum seekers. They came up with a plan to donate some of the bikes to asylum seekers, since they don’t have any means of transportation. They also received monetary donations from the community that allowed them to buy approximately a dozen more bikes, with one catch: Most of those bicycles needed some repair work.

“He had spoken to some of the asylum seekers and some of them actually said ‘hey, I’m great with bikes. I'll come and I’ll work on them,’ ” said Depauw.

Lujan acted as translator and the asylum seekers got to work fixing their own bikes.

“It really required a lot of people working together, ‘bring your nine people working on these bikes,’ they were able to choose which bike they wanted for themselves. And they were also able to get bikes for some of their colleagues back at the hotel,” said Lujan.

Lujan says this was a community effort.

“It was definitely that we've had people not only donate bikes to help and to donate, but this this particular experience actually got more people to donate bikes. So, every single time that we've seen a new story about bikes, we always see an increase of more people coming and dropping off bikes at the hotel, and so that's kind of a part of the reason why we want to do this,” said Lujan.

Shapiro’s furniture store was happy to be a part of the effort.

“It gives them a means of transportation. It gives them a sense of purpose. It gives them a sense of belonging to a new space that they've been put in a really great opportunity for them to get to know each other,” said Shapiro’s Furniture co-owner Angela Shapiro.

Depauw says that he was inspired by the asylum seekers.

“They took discarded parts and bicycle pieces that our community threw away and pieced it all together and made 12-15 working bicycles that they could then use to get back and forth to a job, and they were willing to do whatever needed to whatever work needed to be done to make that happen. So that was inspiring to me,” said Depauw.

Impact Inc. is still seeking donations and volunteers to help collect more bikes.