The Price Is Right
Turning 65 means it's time to get into high gear.

BY MICHAEL MCCARTHY

When people turn 65, most think about collecting their pensions or relaxing on the golf course, or maybe a nice cruise around the Caribbean. But at an age when she should be slowing down, San Rafael’s Marilyn Price is only getting warmed up. Founded back in 1988, Price’s nonprofit organization to benefit disadvantaged children, Trips for Kids, has just celebrated its 45th chapter nationwide, and on March 23, Price will be inducted into the Marin Women’s Hall of Fame. It’s all part of a day’s work for one of Marin’s most high-energy women.

“I don’t plan on retiring, ever,” says the effervescent Price, buzzing around the tiny, cluttered office in an old house in downtown San Rafael that serves as the national headquarters for Trips for Kids. “This isn’t work for me. I never get tired of doing this. It’s the idea of not working that I find depressing. I’ll do this work for as long as I can.”

What Price does is a marvelous combination of social work, care for the environment and promotion of healthy living for kids that has won her much acclaim over the years, culminating in the Hall of Fame award. It’s a well-deserved and long overdue recognition for a woman whose endless energy and enthusiasm for children and the outdoors has become a model for other communities all across the country.

Trips for Kids is a unique program that allows disadvantaged children opportunities to escape their urban environment and enjoy cycling excursions in the great outdoors. For the Marin chapter, that means staff and volunteers lead kids on exciting bike rides to places like Tennessee Valley and Phoenix Lake. Children whose lives are otherwise centered on the streets of inner cities learn motivation, responsibility and basic bike skills, all the while gaining self-confidence and respect for the environment. It’s a remarkable package that has made a huge difference in the lives of many children in the Canal district, Marin City, downtown San Francisco and other neighborhoods around the Bay Area. And TFK is growing at a phenomenal rate of 10 new chapters per year, all the way from L.A. to Boston.

HOW HAS PRICE managed to create such momentum that chapters of TFK are popping up around the nation? Simple: It comes down to the same philosophy that her program tries to instill in all the children it serves. It’s called self-confidence. Give a child the attitude that he or she can fulfill his or her dreams, says Price, and they will. After all, she did it herself.

“I never had a business plan when I started out with Trips for Kids,” says Price, busy digging out old photos of kids, volunteers and staff dating back two decades. “I was just a housewife, a mother of two children who came up with a crazy idea, and went out and made it happen, bit by bit. What I have learned is that anybody can do the same thing, but you need to have a dream and the motivation to set out and make those dreams real.”

Born in St. Louis, Price graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in sociology. She always wanted to be a social worker, but couldn’t find the right job. Price worked as personal assistant for Huey Johnson, formerly the secretary of resources for California from 1978 to 1982 under Governor Jerry Brown’s administration, and then founder of the Resource Renewal Institute in San Francisco. The RRI job suited Price’s passion for saving the environment, but she wanted to do more than that.

“My role models as a child were my mother and Eleanor Roosevelt. They were both very strong women, but I never had any confidence or thought I could make something of myself. Then I saw an article in Bicycling Magazine back in the early ’80s about adults helping children, using bikes as a tool. But I didn’t have the resolve. So I wrote the psychologists featured in the magazine and asked them what they thought. They wrote back and said, ‘Go for it.’ So I finally got started doing what I really wanted to do, rather late in life, and I’ve been making up for lost time ever since.”

Price’s first venture was traveling to a bike show in Reno, and the first four manufacturers she asked all donated bikes and parts. Yakima then gave her two bike racks, and she somehow managed to get as many as 11 bikes crowded on to the roof of her old Volvo. Next, the Sierra Club—which was “anti-bike at the time” because of concerns about the wild behavior on the mountains exhibited by some bikers—adopted Trips for Kids as one of its programs, and Price was away to the races.

“I got up on a soapbox every chance I got, and tried to let people know what I was doing,” says Price. “It was hard at the beginning but I stayed with it. Things just grew, bit by bit.”

TFK incorporated as a nonprofit in 1988 and in 1994 opened the Re-Cyclery, an old wooden house on Fourth Street in San Rafael that acts as a store to sell repaired bicycles. Today the sale of repaired and recycled bikes from the Re-Cyclery brings in about half of TFK’s $500,000 annual budget. There are 15 full- and part-time employees; about 75 regular volunteers round out the Marin County TFK crew.

“A lot of our volunteers are young people who love bikes and want to give back to the community,” explains Price, giving a tour of TFK’s humble Fourth Street facilities. Bike clothing, helmets and gear crowd the tiny hallways. Repaired bikes, all for sale, crowd racks in the front and side of the building. A fully equipped repair shop and many more bikes crowd the backyard, where staff is hard at work on fixing more donated bikes.

The social worker in Price comes to the fore when discussing the many programs that TFK offers to over 300 Bay Area nonprofit organizations involved with children. Aside from group rides to the mountains or seashore, kids can learn bike repair, or join in the Earn-a-Bike program, which lets kids earn credits for bikes of their own. The Mobile Team brings workshops to places like Marin City and Timothy Murphy schools for children with serious emotional and learning disabilities.

After each school day, dozens of local kids drop by the TFK warehouse in the Canal district to get off the streets, hang out with friends and learn bike skills. Jaskaran Singh is one of those kids. While his seventh grade buddies may be at home watching TV or hanging out on the street or at the mall, 13-year-old Singh is busy every afternoon working on bikes at the warehouse.

“I was just going by on the street one day when I saw the sign,” he says, “and I came in to see what it was all about. I already made my own bike, but it’s just a one-speed. You get a credit for every hour you work here, which you can trade in for a helmet or parts. I want to build a mountain bike next.”

The Earn-a-Bike program is led by instructor Matt Harmon, 26, who has been working at Trips for Kids for 18 months. Every day kids are at the warehouse to learn basic bikes skills. The Earn-a-Bike program graduates about 125 kids a year.

“I love working here,” says Harmon. “I love bikes and I love working with kids. We have a lot of success stories here, getting kids off the streets or keeping them out of gangs. We have kids who have become instructors, or have gone on to college. A bike is really just a vehicle to teach kids basic values. We teach kids about social issues and social justice. The kids learn a lot of things they might not otherwise.”

Jaskaran’s buddy Robin, also 13, offers words of wisdom beyond his years: “Riding a bike is a lot like life. You play around, but if you get in trouble, you might not know how to fix it.”

TRIPS FOR KIDS keeps a low profile and may not be well-known to everyone in Marin, but the program racks up some impressive results. In 2005, TFK led 1,283 kids from Marin and the Bay Area on rides into the mountains or countryside, and 214 of them were from the Canal district or Marin City neighborhoods. Since its founding, 11,788 kids from the Bay Area have taken part in TFK rides. Of those, 1,271 were from Marin County. That’s an awful lot of kids who might otherwise be hanging out or wasting time down at the mall.

“Around age 13 or 14, kids have difficult choices to make,” says Harmon. “We’ve lost a lot of kids to gangs here in the Bay Area, kids who might have learned some life skills if they had joined Trips for Kids. These days, there are a lot of drugs out there.”

Harmon’s Earn-a-Bike program kept 130 kids off the streets in 2005, and over the years 1,649 kids have taken part in the program, 1,268 of those from Marin neighborhoods. Last year the TFK kids, along with paid and volunteer staff, repaired and sold 808 bikes that might otherwise have gone into the trash. Since 1994, when the Re-Cyclery opened, Trips for Kids has repaired and sold 6,962 bikes.

Aside from running programs that help kids learn basic life skills and self-confidence, Price is busy raising over half a million dollars per year, either from the annual TFK Bike Sale in June or via donations from foundations and individuals. In that regard, she has had a lot of help. Her board of directors includes big names in biking, such as Gary Fisher. One of her board members, Jerry Pompili, used to work for music impresario Bill Graham. Pompili brought to the Honorary Board some really big names like Mickey Hart, Bob Weir and Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead. The list of patrons has grown to include such luminaries as Huey Lewis, Bonnie Raitt, Carlos Santana, Pete Townshend, Peter Coyote, Tom Weisel and Robin Williams. It’s Price’s reputation, quietly spread by word of mouth, that has led to so many celebrities coming on board.

“IT'S WOMEN LIKE Marilyn Price that we look to honor at the annual Marin Women’s Hall of Fame Awards,” says Pat Warren of the Marin Women’s Commission, which helps to sponsor the celebrations. “We’ve honored some well-known names over the last 19, like Barbara Boxer and Isabel Allende, but we set out to look for interesting women like Marilyn who change so many lives for the better and espouse the principles of the Hall of Fame.”

Those principles are lofty ones; just to be nominated, women must have accomplishments of lasting significance in the Marin community; demonstrate an ability to make others feel empowered to increase and use their own abilities; and have an eye for social change. Those few selected to the Hall of Fame have a history of risk taking, problem solving, conflict resolution and consensus building.

“Marilyn may not be famous, but those of us who pay attention to what is happening in our community know about her and her work,” says Warren. “She has all the qualities we are looking for, and it’s obvious that she has changed many lives.”

Along with Price, this year three other women will be honored for their work in the community. Sylvia Boorstein is a teacher and author and co-founder of Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre. Joanne Dunn has been a founder, board member, fund-raiser and spokesperson for community service organizations for 47 years in Marin. Royce McLemore is founder and leader of Women Helping All People, a nonprofit organization fostering self-esteem and economic independence for women in Marin, particularly Marin City.

“Recognition is always nice, but my whole life is wrapped up in this program,” says Price, looking for files while fielding phone calls. “The best thing about any recognition we receive is the fact that it helps the program grow, and we can certainly use all the financial help we can get.”

Despite its success over the years, Price says TFK has been stuck at a plateau for the past five years due to a lack of funding, and needs more public support to get to the next level. The TFK long-term goal, in a nation beset by what doctors have called “an epidemic of childhood obesity and diabetes,” is to spread the program all over the country and give other inner-city neighborhoods the tools to help themselves, and to get many more kids off the streets and on bikes.

The Trips for Kids national program is supported by donations from manufacturers, foundations and individuals outside the Bay Area. TFK offers new chapters a comprehensive “How To” manual and advice, and fleets of bicycles from manufacturers to get new groups started. At the Fourth Street office in San Rafael, TFK staff answer requests from all over the country for information, provide development resources, publish a national newsletter, organize fund-raisers, hold an annual conference and plan for continued expansion.

“I couldn’t imagine doing this for kids who don’t need it,” says Price matter of factly. “These kids need to learn life lessons—that you need to work hard in order to learn and achieve. Just riding a bike up a hill is hard work for some of these kids. It’s a valuable lesson for them. At the top of the hill, I turn around and congratulate them. I say: ‘See, I told you could do this.’ It’s a big accomplishment for many of these kids.”

Price emphasizes that kids learn from parents and older people around them. “You have to set yourself up as an example to kids. You have to ‘model yourself.’ They see older folks doing good things, and they will follow.”

In a cynical world ruled by politics in which every decision comes down to the dollar, does Price think what she has been doing will make the world a better place?

“Yes, I think the world is changed by every person doing a little bit,” she says. “When I first got started I had no confidence in myself, and I learned that perseverance, hard work and staying with your dream does indeed make a difference in the long run. I will continue doing this, and I certainly don’t ever plan on retiring. That would be really boring.”

Trips for Kids, 6104 Fourth Street, San Rafael; 415/458-2986, www.tripsforkids.org.

PHOTO OF MARILYN PRICE, TARCY FABIAN AND MATT HARMON BY ROBERT VENTE

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