2017 is in the books! What a year.

So often we don’t take the time to reflect on the past and our accomplishments, especially here inside the KBF. In the words of Bill Belichick, it’s always: “We’re on to Inspire![insert geography]”.

But I want to spend some time reflecting on the past year and look forward to the future for the KBF. Let’s start with the numbers:

  • We raised over $1,000,000! We’re still crunching numbers and reconciling the books, but we officially crossed the $1m threshold sometime in December. That’s incredible! Zeke set this as our goal at the beginning of the year and I thought he was crazy. It seemed so lofty but he was confident and rightfully so!
  • We gave 211 adaptive sports equipment grants in 2 grant cycles and through 3 partnerships.
  • We awarded 15 ski clubs a ski racing safety grant.

In 2017 we held Inspire!Denver, Inspire!Boston, Inspire!Vermont, the Kelly Brush Ride, the Killington World Cup Après plus other community events throughout the year (Ski With Kelly, Ride With Kelly, etc). We undertook a Strategic Planning effort as a Board of Directors. We partnered with Killington to make the Women’s World Cup a model of safety and protect racers of all levels at Killington throughout the winter and for years to come. We sent our “Ski Racing Safety is NO Accident” poster to every US Ski and Snowboard member club around the country.

To recap: we did (and grew) a lot! We grew our impact and footprint, which means we were able to increase current staff hours, and we hired (see an intro below)! This was our 4th straight year growing revenue over 25%.

We’re ready for a big 2018! It will hold many victories and challenges and I’m so excited to see what we can do! Demand for our grant programs continues to grow and I hope to keep that momentum. We are adding Inspire!SanFrancisco to our list of events (October 18) and are hoping to grow all of our existing events. I love the loyalty and enthusiasm of our supporters so I hope you all will join us in some way throughout the year!

Thank you to everyone who made 2017 a huge success! Perhaps we sound like a broken record, but we genuinely couldn’t do it without you. We are merely a conduit putting your energy, generosity, and compassion to it’s best possible use!

We’re committed to even more in 2018, see you soon!

Meet Whitney:

We are really excited to introduce Whitney Coombs, our new Brand & Marketing Manager. She joined our team last week and has hit the ground running. She has a diverse background in marketing as well as connections to both the ski world and adaptive sports world. We’re excited for you to meet her and have already forgiven her for being a Dartmouth grad, so we hope you will too 😉

 

Dylan Update:

We had a great Christmas with Dylan. She didn’t get the idea of gifts or Santa this year, but she liked to open presents with us. I would help her start and she would rip them open, but she didn’t really care about the gift inside, once it was unwrapped she would just move on. If only it always stayed like this! She loves to see her cousins and grandparents so she had a lot of fun getting to see both sides of the family. Her grandparents got her a trampoline, which she loves. She has one in her room at daycare and it’s where she heads when she gets there every morning so we assumed it would be a hit. Thankfully we were right!