After a few months of riding a bicycle from Connecticut to Indiana, and back, it is only natural for one to launch a membership and fundraiser campaign for a community bicycle shop days after returning home.

Natural, that is, if you’re Tony Cherolis, who has been instrumental in getting BiCi Co., located at the Center for Latino Progress, up and moving.

BiCi Co. may not be the easiest concept to understand. but if you know what a maker space is, then it’s like that, but with bicycles and the ability to buy them.

Bike education classes were provided for youth there over this past summer, as a first step and as part of a summer youth employment service learning project. Thirty teens were paid for learning some safety and repair basics; they went on to fix up bikes for CRT’s Generations program.

A Build-a-Bike / Earn-a-Bike program for youth will be coming, so that local young folks can learn skills while obtaining inexpensive-to-maintain transportation.

Cherolis says another goal is to have a fully functional storefront at 95 Park Street. Right now there are no bike shops in Hartford that have a storefront presence, an oversight that is more than a little embarrassing.

In the next few months, Cherolis says there will be free trial DIY repair hours on a day and time to be determined; at Monday’s KNOW GOOD Market he asked interested parties for what would be most convenient for them to help figure out this piece of the puzzle. The idea is to introduce this concept of a co-op type space, hoping more people will sign up for memberships once they understand what they will gain from it. The space will also offer workshops and bike rentals.

This is not the kind of project that develops out of the blue. Last year, community members began meeting at MakeHartford to start the conversation on creating a bike co-op in Hartford. Over time, details came into focus, and even more so as Cherolis spent weeks on his bike with lots of time to think through elements of what would be engineered on Park Street.

The 60-day crowdfunding campaign began yesterday; so far BiCi Co. has raised $780 of the $20,000 goal.