Executive Director's 2021 Summary and Infographic

Dear WORCA members,

I am pleased to report that 2021 has been a very successful and productive year for WORCA.

We spent a record amount of $270,000 on trail work this year. $213,000 was for trail maintenance and $57,000 for new trail construction. The increase in trail maintenance work was mostly due to an increase in our Fee for Service funding from the RMOW and this allowed us to expand our trail crew to ten people. This included two youth labourers, partially funded by a Canada Summer Jobs grant. Huge thanks to the whole trail crew for the high-quality work that kept our trails in great condition!

The $57,000 for new trail construction was for the Far Out/Flashback project and this was entirely funded by donations. There was also a huge amount of unpaid work thanks to the many volunteers that attended our trail nights during the year. Work will continue on this project next year with more volunteer trail nights, and we are also waiting to receive approval from the Province to start constructing two more new trails (Mystic-Function and D’Arcy Memorial Trail).

Creating a Trails Administrator position was a big part of being able to increase our trails operations. Nicole Koshure joined us in this role in January 2021, and she has done a fantastic job of creating or improving the systems required to manage everything to do with trails, as well as representing WORCA at many different trails meetings throughout the year. All of this is ongoing work that will allow us to achieve many of the goals in our strategic plan. 

Records were set this year not only for trails, but also for our youth camps. We had 430 registrations for our weekly Dirt Camps this year which was a lot higher than our previous record of 380 (in 2019) and a big increase from the 333 registrations in 2020 (which was affected by COVID restrictions). This was only possible due to the hard work and dedication of our Dirt Camp Manager, Samantha White, and her amazing team of coaches.

Events were once again affected by COVID restrictions, so we were not able to run in-person Toonie Rides, but we did run a lot more virtual Toonies this year (16 compared with 9 last year). However, we did manage to run a large in-person event with the inaugural Back Forty finally taking place in September 2021, after being rescheduled several times (from an initial date of June 2020). This event was a great success and raised $7,000 for the trails, and we plan to run it again in 2022.

Last year, the pandemic had a severe effect on the number of WORCA memberships purchased, which dropped to 1,332. Fortunately, this year it rebounded to 1,814 and this was partly due to to an extra 206 memberships from the Canadian Enduro Series, as all participants were required to have a WORCA membership.

Thank you to everyone that purchased a WORCA membership this year. We hope that you see the value of your membership and that you continue to support our work. We still have a goal of reaching over 2,000 members and we hope that sharing information about our work with more trail users will enable us to achieve this goal.

We are fortunate to have a team of passionate and skilled staff and volunteers at WORCA, and lots of planning work has already started for our 2022 operations. Stay tuned to our newsletters and social media channels to find out more in the coming months!

Sincerely,

Trevor Ferrao

WORCA Executive Director