Executive Director's 2022 Summary and Infographic

Dear WORCA members, 

Overall, 2022 has been a successful year for WORCA. Firstly, thank you very much to everyone that purchased a membership; the big news here is that we had a total of 2,241 members in 2022, so we have reached the goal of 2,000+ members that we set in our 2021-2024 strategic plan. Our previous membership record was 1,826 members in 2014, so this is a significant achievement. Growing our membership allows us to improve everything that WORCA does, so thank you for your support. It has also allowed us to keep our membership prices the same, even though our operating costs have increased due to high inflation.

We employed eleven trail builders this year and spent a total of $321K on trails, which was $294K for trail maintenance and $27K for new trail construction. We created two new Lead Hand positions which made it easier to split our trail crew into smaller groups to work at different locations simultaneously, and once again our trail crew completed a huge amount of high-quality work across the whole trail network. Our volunteer trail nights were extremely popular this year, but we had slightly fewer volunteer hours overall because we could not run any trail nights in the fall due to the high fire danger rating. We will continue to work on completing the Flashback trail project as soon as we can start our trail nights again next spring.

Our Dirt Camps continued to be very popular this year, but we were severely affected by the current labour shortage in Whistler. We anticipated this by increasing our total compensation package for coaches, but we were not able to hire enough coaches and unfortunately had to cancel many Dirt Camp registrations. We normally have around 360 registrations for our weekly camps each summer, but we had to cut this down to 260 for 2022 based on the number of staff available. This was a very large fluctuation, after a record year of 430 registrations in 2021. Feedback from the camps that ran was very positive, thanks to the great work of our Dirt Camps staff. We hope to increase the number of kids that can participate in our camps in 2023 compared with 2022, but we expect the total number to be lower than the past average due to the ongoing labour shortage issues.

After two years of running virtual events, we were finally able to have in-person Toonie Rides again and successfully ran 15 in-person rides as well as continuing to run weekly virtual ones. We had lots of enthusiastic participants and huge support from our sponsors with over $30,000 of prizing as well as great après food and drinks. The second year of The Back Forty was also a very successful event that raised $12K for new trail construction and mountain bike programming for the Indigenous Life Sport Academy, and registration is already looking good for our 2023 event.

Thank you very much to all WORCA members, volunteers, and employees for making 2022 a successful year for our trails and community. We are already implementing plans for 2023, so stay tuned to our newsletter and social channels to hear more.

Sincerely,

Trevor Ferrao

WORCA Executive Director