While other teens were busy getting their driver’s licenses or even inheriting the family car, Jason Tanzman was falling in love with a bicycle.

His love affair revolved around the classic Italian racing bicycle his uncle gave him for his 16th birthday. “This bike gave me a sense of freedom and independence to navigate the streets of Chicago,” Tanzman said. “I didn’t have to bug my parents for a ride.”

Thirteen years later, Tanzman – now development and outreach coordinator for the Sibley Bike Depot on University Avenue in St. Paul – is trying to regift that experience to a new generation of bikers, ones who aren’t necessarily white, male, college-educated 20somethings like himself.

Armed with a growing mission of social justice and a three-year, $300,000 federal grant, the depot has begun to reinvent itself from a nonprofit bike shop offering a handful of youth training programs to a social agency with deeper ties to low-income Twin Cities residents and communities of color.

To that end, the Sibley Bike Depot is well into the second year of its federally funded “Bicycle Library” effort. They’ve partnered with 19 social service agencies to lend bicycles, gear and cycling know-how to low-income clients for at least six months at a time.

Most participants are immigrants or minorities. About 60 percent are female. Both groups fit demographics that, historically, are the least likely to bike to work or school on a regular basis and most likely to be unemployed or underemployed in good years, let alone during a recession.

“Lack of affordable transportation can be a major barrier to reaching a job, to getting to a job interview,” Tanzman said.

Armani Black, a 17-year-old resident of St. Paul’s East Side, hadn’t dared to ride a bike since fourth grade. She learned about the Bicycle Library through the YWCA’s teen job-training program, and rarely a day went by this summer in which she didn’t bike to her internship in downtown St. Paul or use her bike to run errands.

“I can just get up and go whenever I want to,” said Black, who persuaded her mother to buy a bike for her 11-year-old brother. “I don’t have to look at the bus schedule.”

Hilary Otey, associate director with St. Paul-based Sarah’s Oasis for Women, a residential space for women fleeing abuse or facing other challenges, has seen the women she works with undergo a bit of a transformation.

“Of the 12 women who are participating in the bike library program, 10 had never ridden a bike before, and these are adult women,” Otey said. “It’s just an amazing experience for them to learn about another form of independence and saving money and gain confidence doing something they never thought they could do before. Our youngest (participant) is 21 and oldest is 61, so we have a huge range.”

For the bike depot, the renewed sense of focus comes at an appropriate time, with the Twin Cities recently gaining national attention from bicycling magazines. The League of American Bicyclists, a national bike-advocacy organization, recently named St. Paul a “bicycle friendly city,” based in part on the mayor’s decision to hire a sustainable transportation planner and incorporate bicycle routes into the city’s long-term plans.

These days, “bikes are hot,” Tanzman said.

In addition to the Bicycle Library, the bike depot hires high school students, many of them minorities, to serve as bicycle ambassadors of sorts to the greater community each summer. Yet another effort, the “Earn a Bike” program, trains low-income residents to work in the shop. After 50 hours of work, each participant receives a free bicycle.

An “open shop” on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays allows bikers to come in, borrow tools and work on their bikes under the direction of two experienced mechanics. Tuesday nights offer programming for women and transgendered cyclists.

Eager to fully redefine themselves, the depot is even exploring a name change.

The effort to change the name came about, in part, because the depot’s small staff has put the past so far behind them. Members once envisioned themselves as a statewide advocacy group, but the effort mostly fell apart. Founded in 2001 as the Minnesota Bicycle Pedestrian Alliance, the nonprofit had devolved into little more than a bike shop in a drab, poorly lit downtown space four years later. The organization almost folded in 2005.

Tanzman and others joined the board in 2006, and the shop left Sibley Street and moved to larger, brighter quarters behind the SugarRush doughnut shop at 712 W. University Ave., near North Grotto Street, in 2008. Staffers were excited for the change, but they knew little about their multi-ethnic new neighborhood.

Alicia Dvorak, the depot’s education and open shop coordinator, said the shop really started to grow after the move.

“Once we moved to this space just more and more people came in,” Dvorak said. “We sold more bikes, so we had money to hire staff and create programming.”

Slowly, they’ve begun to better define their mission.

For the three-year bike lending initiative, the depot last year partnered with 19 social services agencies such as Lao Family, Project for Pride in Living, the YWCA on Selby Avenue, the American Indian Family Center and the Minneapolis-based Pillsbury United Communities Waite House. About half the programs are in St. Paul.

Program director Claire Stoscheck said the depot lent 150 bikes last year and an additional 220 this year, in addition to 14 attachable bike trailers for kids. This year, they attached odometers to the bikes to track usage, and found many members logging 300 miles or more. One participant rode more than 2,000 miles.

Others are still getting their feet wet.

“Some of the people we work with are adults who don’t yet know how to ride,” Stoscheck said. “We offer ‘Learn to Ride’ classes in the spring. We are reaching folks who are at 200 percent of the poverty level or below.” At the end of the program, participants can buy their bikes at a discount or continue to use them, after appropriate winter-riding training.

The depot’s small staff is well aware that they’ll soon be surrounded on all sides by construction of the Central Corridor light-rail transit line, which will roll out along University Avenue from downtown Minneapolis to downtown St. Paul in 2014.

Tanzman said he and others he works with support public transportation, but the railway will narrow University Avenue, making cycling harder.

Ideas on the table include turning Charles Avenue, which runs parallel to University, into a “bicycle boulevard,” with bike lanes and traffic-calming measures appropriate for cyclists.

Reporter Kaitlin Walker contributed to this report.