WHY would you want to help VASS achieve its mission of “Making the mountains accessible to all”? Here are a quick 30 seconds of reason. We change lives and you can see it happen seven days week from January through March on our Northshore Vancouver Mountains.
One of the coolest things about partnering with VASS is that you can grab a few of your team and come and visit us and see how impactful your contributions are. VASS is 100% funded through a combination of our mountain relationships, corporate partnership, grants, individual donations and fundraising initiatives. We have four major costs in providing our services: lift tickets, training, staff and equipment.
Lift tickets are taken care of via our mountain relationships and a giant thank you to Grouse Mountain, Cypress Mountain and Mount Seymour.
We train more instructors every year, than any other adaptive snow sports organization in Canada. We average training over 100 new CADS 1 ski or snowboard instructors every year. This is facilitated internal as we invest into our higher level instructors and course conductor leadership team. To maintain high standards and continue to be on the cutting edge of our sports, annually this team attends training conferences provided by Canadian Adaptive Snowsports, Canadian Ski Instructor Alliance, Canadian Association of Snowboard Instructors, Ski Spectacular in Denver and Mt Hood Ski and Ride Summit in Oregon.
We run a very lean team of paid staff. There is an executive director who doubles as one of the highest certified instructor trainers in Canada. We have a part-time technical director that heads up training initiatives. And finally we have a part-time bookkeeper and a part-time administrative assistant that facilitates our communications and fundraising efforts.
Our equipment that assists people with disabilities is second to none. Our biggest ticket items are sit skis, with the average cost being around $8000. In 2020/21 we are adding the first in Canada Tetraski to our fleet which is a sit ski that can be controlled by joystick or sip and pull technology. We have partnered with a university in Utah to help bring this project to Canada. Look forward to the big unveiling event in January.
