TAKE CARE OF YOUR TRAILS - 2023

Take care of Your trails is back again for its 7th edition during the month of May in 2023. Trail maintenance across Europe are conducted largely on a volunteer basis, so without all those amazing volunteers and trail associations behind them, our trails would not exist. TCoYT is a means for trail associations to recruit new volunteers, and get people stoked about giving back to the trails. The idea is to create a fun day out on the trails, where everyone in the community is invited to dig in, meet new people, and above all protect and preserve our trail networks.

In 2023 the focus is on encouraging more youth participation in trail maintenance events, to highlight the importance & benefits of getting young people outdoors and active in the community. Participants don’t even necessarily need to be mountain bikers. Crews signing up for TCoYT are encouraged to be innovative in their recruitment of new volunteers, through (for example) contacting local schools, scout groups, forestry services.

The goal is to get more youth involved in the outdoors, having fun, and exposed to the stoke of mountain biking!

Please complete the registration form before April 15th . Groups responding after this date will still be included but will miss the benefit of being part of the launch. To give your crew the recognition you all deserve, please provide a short bio and photo in the ‘registration form’.

Your event will be added to the IMBA Europe ‘Take Care of Your Trails’ map along with your event link for volunteers to register and contact details.

We recommend that you manage local promotion and promote your event to your existing volunteers & through your social media channels. We will also be making a BIG push on our own socials, so be sure to tag DMBinS and IMBA Europe, and send through any images of your crew.

IMBA Europe have made a DIGITAL PROMO TOOLKIT for you with social media images. Please feel free to send us updates via email on your events, as well as tagging us and IMBA Europe in anything you may share on social media.

After your event, IMBA EUROPE will ask you to provide the number of volunteers that participated at your trail repair, build or clean-up session and the approx. number of hours they worked on the site. That will provide a good indication of the impact of the campaign (something we will highlight towards municipalities, land managers, Nat. Park authorities etc.). Due to the new GDPR directives, you wont be asked to provide names of the volunteers but instead, please provide a group picture of all volunteers.

Which crews will stand out in 2023 and take home the accolades and bragging rights? Have you and your crew got what it takes to make a difference; create positive change with your actions? Find out more about the 2023 Awards!

An initiative that we started in 2015 here in Scotland, took on a pan European slant as in 2017 we worked with IMBA Europe to organise the largest ever concerted voluntary trail repair, maintenance, and build effort.

Over a weekend in April the first-ever pan European ‘Take Care of Your Trails’ weekend took place with trail repair groups from Scotland to Poland, Denmark to Czech Republic and Sweden to Spain, engaging in a friendly competition to see which country could get the most amount of volunteers to work on paths and trails per head of population.

Centrally co-ordinated by IMBA Europe, thousands of volunteers took part and this set the precedence for the initiative moving forward.

Every year we work closely with IMBA Europe to promote the campaign to trails associations and volunteer groups across Scotland.

This year the stoke is being raised and the campaign is going bigger and better!