MDC Iowa partners with IC Bike Library to offer unique STEM-related classes for youth

This story first appeared in STEM in Iowa 2024, an annual special section distributed in The Gazette that provides an in-depth look at how this educational pathway is having an impact in the classroom as well as in future workforce pipelines.

Tracy Jon Sargeant has a vision: he wants to bring STEM education — and more importantly, STEM-related careers — to kids of color.

Full time, Sargeant is a cyber security engineer, but his “part-time” gig is founder and executive director of the Multicultural Development Center of Iowa (MDC Iowa), a nonprofit he started in 2017 to help students and young adults “imagine their unrealized potential in science, technology, engineering, math, and small business ownership.”

It’s not a small proposition.

“Throughout all of my career, at any conference, I am almost always the only person of color in the room,” Sargeant said. “I’ve always felt like an outsider.”

He started MDC Iowa with the sole purpose of addressing the lack of diversity in STEM-related businesses and projects, while at the same time removing any socioeconomic barriers that prevented people of color from taking classes or finding other opportunities to learn or participate. Classes are free to all participants.

“We were reaching some folks, but I really wanted to reach more,” he explained, but location was a major deterrent. “We were the couch surfers of the nonprofit world. We would hold classes in the library or other places we could find room.”

Then he met Audrey Wiedemeier, executive director of the Iowa City Bike Library. Through her leadership and with the help of countless volunteers, the bike library offers several programs designed to teach cyclists how to maintain and repair their own bikes on their own.

“We’re not going to service the bike for you, but we’ll teach you how to service it yourself,” Wiedemeier said. “We are very hands-off — we want people to really learn how to do this themselves. And if we do have to do something to demonstrate how to fix it, we’re going to undo it and have you do it again.”

A group of young students graduate form the Multicultural Development Center of Iowa's STEM camp. (Submitted photo)

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The Multicultural Development Center of Iowa helps students and young adults “imagine their unrealized potential in science, technology, engineering, math and small business ownership” with STEM camps. (Submitted photo)

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“We’re still the best-kept secret in Johnson County,” she added. “Once people find out about us, they’re like, ‘Oh, I can do that here,’ then they come in and get what they need and fix what they need and hopefully they become regular customers.”

The Iowa City Bike Library offers three open shop opportunities: Rent-a-Bench is open to anyone on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays; Women/Trans*/Femme Night is open Tuesday nights for non-binary, gender non-conforming, female-identifying, transgender and femme cyclists; and Outspoken Teens is open Thursday afternoons for teens.

They also offer a bike camp, offering bicycle safety education as well as maintenance.

For Sargeant, that camp symbolized the opening of a door.

“I met Audrey, and we immediately clicked,” he said.

The two partnered to offer bike-focused STEM-related classes for kids of all ages at the bike library. The first: making a bike light using Sargeant’s 3-D printers, magnets and wires.

“I came up with a cool design, I printed it, we added some magnets and wires, and we taught these kids about STEM and how it related to bikes,” he said.

When the bike library relocated to its current location on Gilbert Court in Iowa City, MDC Iowa used some of the space as a “makerspace” to give MDC Iowa a permanent home until just recently, when the MDC Iowa moved to a larger space.

“Audrey really set that bar for us, ‘What does partnership mean to you?’” he said. “A lot of the things we have been able to accomplish has been thanks to her understanding of how that network works.”