Message from Trevor, our Executive Director

Dear WORCA members,

We hope that you are staying safe, healthy and positive. Our daily lives are very different right now due to the COVID-19 pandemic and WORCA is doing everything possible to adapt to these challenging times. We are part of a strong community that will work together to get through this.

We received news in the past week that our Fee for Service funding from the RMOW has been reduced from $120,000 to $40,000 for 2020. This is understandable, given the need to focus on the provision of essential services right now. We are adapting our work plans to make the best use of this $40,000 for trail maintenance. We know that our multi-use trail network is very important for the local community and this will be even more true in the next few months if physical distancing rules continue to be required. Many of us will want to use the trails to help with our physical and mental health.

Our trail crew will start work on April 20th and the priority will be getting trails open and ensuring that they are safe to use. We will take advantage of government measures such as the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy to keep our trail crew employed as long as possible, but we anticipate significantly reduced hours after the end of June. As you can imagine, our ability to work on trails throughout the network will be much more limited than usual, but we will do our best to keep trails maintained and open.

As well as the reduction in our Fee for Service, we will not be receiving revenue from fundraisers (e.g. the Bike Swap), sponsorship, commercial operators and general donations. At this time, we are relying on membership fees to allow us to continue operating across all areas: trail maintenance, youth camps, events and trail advocacy. If you are able to sign up for a 2020 membership, your support right now means more than ever before! As always, a huge amount of very valuable unpaid work also continues to be performed by our twelve volunteer directors.

We are still planning to run our youth camps in July and August and registration opened on April 4th. Some of our camps have sold out but there are still spots available for certain weeks. As announced previously, we are accepting a 25% deposit for youth camp registrations with the balance payable by May 31st.

Toonie Rides will not be possible in May due to a provincial health order that prohibits events up to May 31st. We plan to start our Toonie Rides as soon as possible and will continue to monitor provincial rules and guidelines to determine when that will happen. The Back Forty has been postponed until the fall and we are still trying to find a new date for this event.

Finally, I would like to remind everyone about the importance of staying in your own community right now, close to home. For most of our members who live in Whistler, this means staying in Whistler and not travelling to Squamish or Pemberton. If we all do our part to minimize our movements and adhere to physical distancing rules, a more normal way of life will return sooner rather than later. We hope that it will not be too long before it is safe for us to be out on the trails together! 

Sincerely,

Trevor Ferrao

Executive Director