Some of the best choices are the most difficult to make and stepping down as SwimBowen’s event director is exactly that: a good but hard decision.
With SwimBowen’s foundation firmly in place, along with incredible, wide reaching support, the timing is perfect to pass the torch. We are looking for a new event director to carry this project forward.
For the last 6 years the SwimBowen Society team has fine tuned the event structure and flow, working to produce the best possible experience for not only the swimmers but the volunteers, spectators, donors and sponsors too. There is always more to do. But the event has excellent bone structure, and moving forward from here will be well supported.
We have a solid home in our hard working (and beautiful) website - thanks to Rob Severin of Rainforest Digital. And our well organized Google drive (thank you Jillian Walker and Deb Thomson) ensures all event details are at our fingertips. Thanks in part to the support from the Bowen Island Municipality Community Grants In Aid Program, we have gradually built out our larger, event day equipment purchases (branded buoys, flags, banners etc). And our event platform for registration, volunteers, sponsors and donors has been worked and reworked to ensure excellent communication between the SwimBowen team and users.
But mostly what gets our team up in the morning is the intangible strength of the SwimBowen community. We seem to have struck a chord in the dual world of ocean swimming and fundraising. We are humbled by the remarkable enthusiasm for this tiny community event supporting friends and neighbours enduring the long haul of cancer treatment.
I think it’s what we are all hungry for. I think this event feeds our need to find real time agency in the face of a disease that can make us feel so utterly powerless. Take that cancer.
As for me, I will stay on as the SwimBowen Society Chair and will be fully available to mentor the next director through the 2024 event.
My dream is to be a registrant in next year’s event. To experience SwimBowen from the other side and to reach, roll, pull, exhale with all the other participants in our beloved Salish Sea for the Cancer Care Fund.
But really my biggest dream is to see SwimBowen embraced by a new leader, someone to float this beautiful creature on future July tides. A new leader to breathe their own brand of wonderful into SwimBowen and watch how amazing things happen when you put together good people, ocean swimming and grassroots fundraising.
It’s like throwing the best party ever. It’s like the northern lights in the middle of the day. Impossibly, beautifully awe inspiring.
For more information on becoming SwimBowen’s next event director, please reach out to me, Mary Letson at [email protected], or call 604-947-9601.
