Friday, March 13, 2020
The Recovery Ride has always been about more than getting on our bikes on a single day to ride 40, 25 or 12 miles. It’s been about the larger idea – a community joining together to provide hometown support to local nonprofits supporting recovery from alcohol and drug addiction, and innovative HIV prevention and services in San Diego.
Since we started, the day of The Recovery Ride has been a heartwarming and special day for all those who participate. Our routes have been planned with care, lined by a small army of volunteers with pom-poms and cowbells and cheer in their voices, and we’ve had the great pleasure to witness hundreds of (mostly) cheerful riders enjoy (mostly) incredible weather while they pedal the miles away. Just take a look at the photos on our website to see some of the incredible memories from these past four years.
We started the ride in 2016 and raised $16,000. In 2017, you helped us increase that to $36,000. Both 2018 and 2019 rides raised about $75,000 each, totaling over $200,000 over our first four years. And most of those totals come from modest individual donations – thousands of them – from our community, friends, family and those impacted in some way.
These funds have had a measurable impact. In the Spring of 2019, proceeds from The Recovery Ride enabled Stepping Stone to open its Stepping Out outpatient program, which now serves 60+ people each month without access to other recovery resources. This simply would not have been possible without you.
We’re celebrating our fifth year in 2020, and our goals have been as lofty as ever – to raise $100,000 to distribute to our nonprofit beneficiaries. Our training rides this year have been epic, and we have had a record-breaking response in terms of donations and registration thus far.
Now, the Coronavirus is in our community and on our minds, and, in addition to the growing recommendations to cancel non-essential events over a certain size, our infrastructure simply cannot support the precautions necessary if we were to hold the event. We are a community of riders and volunteers, but as such, we are not scientists or health officials, and we feel an obligation to follow their guidelines.
Accordingly, we have made the difficult decision to cancel The Recovery Ride 2020.
We would like to thank you for your support.
We will be continuing the ride as a virtual event on April 19, 2020, celebrating our wonderful fundraisers and teams, and we will be keeping registration open for virtual riders. We have some exciting ideas to continue the mission of this ride “from a distance.” Fundraising is a huge part of the way this ride supports our beneficiaries, and we invite you to help us continue that effort until April 19. We will post information on our website FAQs shortly to answer your questions.
Oh, and yes – if you were wondering – there will still be a t-shirt this year!
With love, Jere