A Street Level Cycles youth staff member rings up a customer at its weekend community Open Shop, where community members can use the org’s tools, and its staff’s know-how, to fix their own bikes. Courtesy: Street Level Cycles
Waterside Workshops, a nonprofit based in Berkeley’s Aquatic Park that teaches community members boatbuilding and bike repair skills, is facing significant financial headwinds.
Hours have been curtailed this year at the 18-year-old organization’s Street Level Cycles program as four staff members, one full-time, three part-time, have been laid off. The nonprofit’s youth mental health case manager, a full-time position, has also been cut.
It’s a huge loss for a small team — Waterside has seven full-time, four part-time and three youth staff members remaining — and for the nonprofit’s most public-facing program. Street Level Cycles refurbishes and sells over 1,000 bikes annually, and gives away more than 100 to community members in need. Last year it served some 1,800 people at its weekend community Open Shop, where community members can use the org’s tools, and its staff’s know-how, to fix their own bikes.
Construction of Berkeley Commons, a 540,000 square-foot life sciences complex, reduced access to Waterside Workshops over the past few years but the nonprofit’s bike sales have started to pick up since completion of the project. And after a slate of capital improvement projects, Aquatic Park is on the verge of a new era. Credit: Ximena Natera, Berkeleyside/CatchLight Local
Waterside is facing a “major grant deficit,” according to Rebecca Grove, Waterside’s executive director, including the denial of two major government grants that the organization was counting on this year, and the loss of two general operating grants, amounting to $200,000, that have helped sustain the operation for the past seven years. Waterside’s annual budget of $1.3 million in 2025, is expected to dip below $1 million next year.
Reduced sales at the bike shop amid ongoing construction on Bolivar Drive has contributed to the pain, though money brought in from selling bikes still amounts to about two-thirds of revenue for Street Level Cycles.
“They made their budget numbers and we still had to lay people off,” Grove said. “ That’s what’s really hard, working that hard and selling those bikes and it still not being enough.”
Helder Parreira, who co-founded Waterside Workshops in 2007 and still runs the Berkeley Boathouse program, noted that a “huge bubble” of bike sales during the pandemic led the organization to hire more staff at Street Level Cycles. But now that the demand for bikes has waned, the organization needs to do some “fiscal readjustment,” he said.
Climate Action Program interns harvesting vegetables in the garden. Courtesy: Waterside Workshops
One part of that adjustment is the expansion of Waterside’s hands-on youth job training program with the launch of a new Climate Action Program, which will include a community garden and outdoor kitchen and will offer interns skills in gardening, landscaping, cooking, and more.
Each year the organization works with about 75 young interns, split between Street Level Cycles and its Berkeley Boathouse programs. The interns, who range in age from 14-24, are paid for their work, while also gaining job skills. Waterside hopes to increase the number of interns to 85 next year with the launch of the new gardening and cooking program.
It opened Sunday, funded in part by a grant from the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Fund, with contributions from Berkeley Rotary Club, and the Altamont Education Advisory Board.
“Having multiple things going on attracts kids in different ways and that allows us to connect with them in different ways,” Parreira said. “Grants go through these cycles. … In the long scheme of things, in the nearly 20 years that I’ve been involved, it’s not that big of an issue. We’ve weathered other stuff.”
Waterside Workshops, who co-founded the nonprofit in 2007, works in the shop last year. Credit: Ximena Natera, Berkeleyside/CatchLight Local
Waterside Workshops is also reaching out to its community to help fill funding gaps. It recently raised $40,000 from a fundraising event, and hopes to raise $50,000 from individual donors before year’s end.
Waterside is also asking the city for $121,000 in the next budget cycle. It is a tenant of the city, and Waterside is arguing the funding would help make up for the revenue lost because of construction in Aquatic Park.
And while it will continue to apply for grants, Waterside is also looking to diversify its funding streams, including “bolstering” its corporate sponsorships, Grove said. Waterside already has a handful of corporate sponsors, including Bayer and Clif Bar, but Grove hopes to attract more.
2 foundations are cutting off funding after this year
Two family foundations that have helped Waterside with general operating support for several years, will no longer offer funding starting next year. The foundations — the Satterberg Foundation, which is under new management, and has new funding guidelines, and the Hellman Foundation, which is spending down its capital by 2034 — accounted for $200,000 of Waterside’s annual budget for the last seven years.
Waterside also budgeted for two major government grants for 2025 — one from the California State Coastal Conservancy and another from Parks California — that were both denied “due to a reduction in funds” available to the agencies, according to Grove.
The James-Miyoshi family tries out some of the bikes for sale from Waterside Workshops in February 2024. Credit: Ximena Natera, Berkeleyside/CatchLight
These grants helped fund the organization’s Waterside Adventures program, which takes its city-dwelling interns into nature — camping trips, hiking excursions, surfing trips, even paddling across the Bay in a double-hulled Polynesian canoe — while teaching leadership skills, such as planning, communication, trust-building, and risk-taking.
Beyond specific grants, Grove said that the “broader fundraising and nonprofit organization landscape is at risk” under the Trump administration. She pointed to the defunding of federal agencies that administer the types of grants Waterside applies for, such as the Department of Education, the EPA, and the US Forest Service, as well as threats to private progressive foundations, such as the Ford Foundation, which the White House has promised to “go after,” according to Politico.
Granting agencies have also noted “the difficult economic conditions that may lie ahead,” when turning down grant requests, according to Grove.
Waterside Workshops believes sunny days are ahead
Waterside Workshops interns at a community cookout. Courtesy: Waterside Workshops
The launch of Waterside’s new Climate Action Program is another positive turn, giving the organization the opportunity to create new experiences for its interns, along with building new partnerships.
Partners include UC Botanical Garden, the Edible Schoolyard Project, StopWaste, and the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce. Webcor and Rebuilding Together helped build the outdoor kitchen and garden space.
“Not only did we get to renovate our space in a beautiful way and create a food source for our youth who are food insecure and strategies for healthy meal planning, we also found a way to create internships out of it,” said Grove.
Parreira works to repair a boat in 2024. Credit: Ximena Natera, Berkeleyside/CatchLight
Food was a part of Waterside for many years. A cafe it ran for a decade as part of its job training program was forced to close during the pandemic, and plans to reopen it are still on the backburner, according to Parreira. But a community garden was never part of his plan.
“Garden programs always seemed to me to be cliche in a way with youth development,” he said.
But now that the garden beds are in place, and the outdoor kitchen is built, and the fruit trees he planted on the property 15 years ago are fully developed, he’s excited that a formal garden program is part of the organization’s offerings. And he is optimistic about the future.
“All of Waterside is going to be used to its full potential now,” he said.
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