Homeless in Tampa, but now with a bike. Thanks to these guys.

TAMPA — In a rain-soaked church parking lot downtown, on a Sunday morning before most people were awake, Jessie Rivers was cheering on his wife Marie as she pedaled past him on a new pink bike.

New to her, anyway.

She wobbled a little getting started, then righted herself on this bright bicycle that had already lived another life. “There you go!” Rivers called as she neatly looped the lot.

This particular morning was cold and spitting rain. Homeless people like them, some with backpacks and bedrolls, flocked past them into Portico, a cluster of church buildings and a coffee shop, for Sunday breakfast and the chance to be inside awhile. And, for some, the chance for a bike and the freedom that came with it.

In October, two retired guys — Tom Henry and Tim Eves, buddies Tom and Tim — started working with Sacred Heart Catholic Church on a volunteer outreach program called Bikes from the Heart. They refurbish bicycles recovered from police impound lots, left behind on city buses and donated. Fill out an application one week, get your bike the next.

“This is kind of where the rubber hits the road,” said Eves in the Portico parking lot,

The application asks, among other things, how the bike will help. For work, people wrote. To get to day labor gigs, to the doctor, the Social Security office, to court. I have knee pain, a man wrote. “I’m just tired of walking,” a woman said.

That morning, volunteers also worked on bikes brought in by homeless people, adjusting brakes, un-wobbling tires, fixing flats, broken spokes and cranky gears. A woman walked up with her battered aqua-green cruiser, one of its broken-off pedals perched on the bike seat.

Rivers sat next to his wife astride his own new bike, a tall silver one, one of 14 ready to roll that morning.

“A bike will help us a lot,” he said. “God was with us.”

Inside Bikes from the Heart

The big room at the old Sacred Heart Catholic Church school on Florida Avenue smelled of weathered wood floors, buttery sunshine streaming through big windows and mostly, rubber bike tires. Hundreds and hundreds of rubber tires on hundreds of bikes collected there.

“Lefty loosey,” said Henry, working a bike on a Thursday morning. “It has a wobble. I’m trying to true it up.”

It started with fixing bikes at churches and realizing the need for not just repairs but for bikes themselves. Henry, Eves and up to a dozen volunteers work here, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.

The workshop has an easy feel of people liking what they do. They work to music — country, 70s, 80s. When a worker boasts he’s finished two bikes already, another teases him that it’s no surprise since he’d been working on “cream puffs” ― bikes in need of only minimal attention.

Others bikes that come here look like they might have been sideswiped by a bus.

On a wall hangs a testament to human ingenuity or maybe desperation: a bicycle rim without a tire that the owner wrapped in duct tape to try to keep it going one more mile.

“We’ve got a need for maybe 20 bikes a week — we can fill that,” said Henry, who sold communications equipment before he retired.

For bike recipients there’s a requirement: Applicants must bring a bike lock or they can buy one from the program for $10, the goal being to make this an investment for the person riding it. “A lock makes them the owner,” said bike tech Dan Winegrad. The application they sign also says they agree not to sell, trade or pawn the bike, which is QR-coded and labeled Bikes from the Heart.

Homeless clients are encouraged to volunteer and do. “While we’re fixing your bike, help us with something,” Eves will say, like pressure washing bikes. Over Christmas, a homeless man who had once been with a symphony had them singing Jingle Bells while they worked.

The program also has a collection of children’s bicycles looking for homes: “We don’t have a source to give these kids’ bikes to,” Henry said. Yet.

Volunteers say there is satisfaction in the work, in getting hands dirty. “Just creating this community,” said Henry.

“It changes their lives,” said Eves.

Bikes from the Heart is up for an Urban Excellence Award on Wednesday from the Tampa Downtown Partnership for programs and people that have made “a lasting, positive impact” in the city.

A wheel up

“Texas,” said Gregory Brown as he climbed onto a silver bike in the Portico parking lot. That’s where he planned to head on this bike, he said, making them laugh.

Brown brought in his last bike, the one he was sometimes riding 15-20 miles a day to his part time security job and to see his family. A donated old-generation blue rental bike, it had chunks missing from its hard permanent tires. They’ll try to fix it up or maybe cannibalize it for parts to get other bikes going.

People kept coming: Barbara Burden tried out a black Huffy beach cruiser with pink rims. “I love it,” she said. Richard Otto, living in a tent city, said he’d ride his new bike to the Salvation Army to see his mother.

Brown talked of his own plans: “I’m going to get me a place soon,” he said. “The bicycle helps a lot,”