Progressive Climbing Education meeting - Please RSVP

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The Mountaineers Board of Directors has spent the last 2 years really trying to understand what’s working for us, and what needs improvement, specifically with regard to our education model.  The Board has spent a lot of time seeking input, and we’ve heard some key themes that our volunteers and members are facing:  many volunteers feel overburdened and burnout is high; volunteer recruitment continues to be challenging; permitting has made things increasingly more challenging; our crags are becoming overrun with climbers, and more and more climbers who don’t really know what they’re doing; our most skilled volunteers have few growth opportunities within The Mountaineers – there are no advanced opportunities for our advanced volunteers to take their skills further; we continue to struggle to attract younger and more diverse students.

The Board is directing funds to a project we’re calling Progressive Climbing Education, and the goal is to invest significant time and money into figuring out how we can make our suite of volunteer-led Climbing Programs easier and more fun for volunteers to run, easier to recruit volunteers for, more attractive to young new climbers (especially those coming out of the gym), and more advanced for our highly skilled volunteers.

Our first step is to make sure we truly understand the needs of our volunteers who are running the courses, and of the community at large, including our students.  We are conducting three listening sessions in June and we would like as many of our climbing volunteers, students and others in the climbing community to attend as possible.  Our goal is to understand what matters most to you and what you think will make our climbing programs even better than they already are.  At these listening sessions, we’ll also share our timeline and communications plan for this first phase, which is an information gathering and brainstorming phase.

What’s the long-term vision?  We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel.  We’ve got a good thing going, but we also recognize that the world is a very different place than it was even 20 years ago, and what got us here won’t necessarily take us to where we want to go.  Our long-term goal is to work with our volunteer climbing leadership and partners in the community to identify, reinforce and support the things that are working, tweak things that need tweaking, add things that will make things easier or more relevant, and remove things that are in our way.

Please join us in the conversation!