December 3, 2024
Found in “Community news”
This Giving Tuesday we want to say thank you to everyone involved in the MEC community, whether you attended an event, snagged some Smartwool socks for Sock Week or donated to one of our Outdoor Impact partners, your involvement makes all the difference in how we’re able to show up for the planet.
Today, we want to give a major shoutout to a few of our partners for their incredible work on this year’s outdoors initiatives. Through partnerships and hosting sweet outdoors events that give back to the community, MEC is committed to the ongoing journey of celebrating our home planet and supporting our people. Like any mission that involves breaking new trail, we could never do it alone.
This year was full of inspiring work, fun events and important movements in support of climate change and conservation. We’d like to highlight the work of two of our Outdoor Impact partners, Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society and Protect Our Winters Canada, who have crushed some big goals this season.
Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society
The Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS) is Canada’s only charity dedicated to the protection of public land, freshwater and ocean with a strong national and regional presence across the country. They are Canada’s leader in conservation and have played a lead role in protecting over half a million square kilometres.
MEC has partnered with CPAWS since 1988. We work with their national and regional teams to provide funding and to help increase the protection of the wild spaces where we climb, camp, ski and play.
In partnership with CPAWS, MEC and Smartwool have helped raise $55,000 since 2021 through our Sock Week initiative, a week-long event where $2 from every pair of Smartwool socks sold is donated to CPAWS (up to $15,000 annually). It’s two things our MEC members love most: socks and giving back to the planet.
Through funding these initiatives, MEC can play a small part in conservation efforts across Canada. One of these efforts became a success story earlier this year: CPAWS’s We Can’t Wait campaign led to the successful protection of the Great Bear Sea, 30,000km2 along Canada’s Pacific shoreline. The Great Bear Sea is integral to Pacific coast ocean life and is home to orca whales, sea otters, migrating humpbacks and tons more species at risk of going extinct.
If you’d like to get involved or donate to a CPAWS initiative, check out their website to learn more about their amazing work. You can also shop last chance Sock Week deals where $2 from each pair of Smartwool socks will go directly to CPAWS.
Protect Our Winters Canada
The mission of Protect Our Winters (POW) Canada is to turn outdoor enthusiasts into climate advocates. They lead a national community of professional athletes, forward-thinking industry leaders and outdoor enthusiasts to advocate for systemic policy solutions to climate change with 13 chapters nationwide.
MEC is proud to be a founding partner of POW Canada. One of our favourite annual events is the Season Opener, which, in partnership with Arc’teryx, we host at MEC locations across Canada. If you missed out on tickets this year, stay tuned for all the highlights and stories from this year’s event — we’ll have a recap coming for you. That said, we do have one spoiler we’re pumped to share with our community: this year’s Season Opener events raised over $43,300 in support of POW’s climate action plan—that's huge!
If you want to get involved or learn more about POW Canada and their fight for climate action, click below to check out their site.
All about MEC's Outdoor Impact program
CPAWS and POW Canada are part of a larger network of outdoor orgs that make up our MEC Outdoor Impact program, which includes national partners, like Spirit North, the Association of Canadian Mountain Guides (ACMG) and Avalanche Canada, as well as local partners, like the North Shore Mountain Bike Association. We invest in groups that are actively working to break down barriers of access and increase equity in the outdoors.
Through it all, our goal is to help:
- Teach outdoor skills
- Protect wild spaces
- Grow the communities of people getting active outside
Since 1987, we’ve contributed over $48 million (and counting) to Canadian outdoor recreation and conservation initiatives – and your support of MEC makes it all possible. If you’d like to learn more about our Outdoor Impact program or see how to get involved with one of our partners, then click below.
