The environmental non-profit doubling down on Hope

Hope isn’t Squamish.

But the small town in the Fraser Valley has many of the same natural assets that have helped its seaside cousin shift from a sawmill town into a new type of natural resource-based economy: a tourism hotspot full of beautiful forests and mountains, hiking and biking trails, and nearby rock-climbing spots. And the founders of the Hope Mountain Centre say that those assets and the connections to nature they shape are a growing part of the community’s identity—even as the centre itself scales back.

Two decades ago, the Hope Mountain Centre was founded to provide outdoor education and recreation in and around Hope. But the group behind the centre had also hoped to change the way the town sees itself—from a former resource town to an outdoor playground (just like Squamish).

The Hope Mountain Centre is one of the most prominent non-profit organizations in the eastern Fraser Valley, where it leads a variety of outdoor education, recreation, and conservation projects in and around Hope. After launching in 2004 as part of the school district, the organization split off and became an independent charity. From the start, the group that started the centre hoped to go beyond education and conservation and start shifting the way the town saw itself.

Hope was a recreational destination long before the Hope Mountain Centre was created. But the centre’s founding members hoped that promoting and holding educational and recreational events would emphasize the accessibility and wealth of Hope’s outdoor options.

Today, the centre offers guided mountain explorations, hikes, trail building projects, and an annual river canoe trip from Hope to Agassiz. Educational programs in schools, as well as conservation projects like recording grizzly bear sightings, are also part of the organization’s purview today.

But the centre started with a much narrower focus.

The concept for the organization was hatched by a group of teachers and educators, all united by a passion for the natural world, according to Kelly Pearce, the organization’s trails director.

“It was an idea that was sort of percolating, I think, in a few other people's minds,” Pearce said. “We had a room full of about a dozen people, myself, and retired and currently still working teachers—people who really believe in outdoor education and place-based learning.”

Once established as a non-profit outside of the school district, the centre started to branch out. It received contracts to test water quality and started working on riparian planting projects. As the organization’s scope expanded, the volunteers running the centre learned that the conservation projects could also function as educational tools if students became involved.

Small but mighty

Even with the support of the community, the Hope Mountain Centre tackled projects that were a little more ambitious than most expected from a small-town non-profit.

With just 6,000 residents, Hope is not a big place. But the town’s population only forms part of the centre’s patrons—and only provides part of the financial support of the programming.

A significant portion of the centre’s funding actually comes from south of the border. When the idea for the Hope Mountain Centre first originated, Pearce said, the group knew that an American organization, the Skagit Environmental Endowment Commission (SEEC), had funding available for educational projects within the Skagit watershed. The watershed is an important ecological area that stretches 2,370 square miles along the course of the Skagit River. Most of that area is in Washington, extending from Anacortes in the west through the Cascades National Park in the East. In the early 2000s, the SEEC looked for a Canadian partner to run educational programs in the relatively small Canadian portion of the Skagit Valley. The freshly-formed Hope Mountain Centre volunteered. Today, about one-quarter of the centre’s funding still comes from SEEC.

The centre’s programs are also popular outside of Hope; in fact, many participants in its educational programs are visitors to town and from other Lower Mainland communities and beyond. The geography helps make access possible. Hope is an easy place to get to, Pearce said, with “magnificent highways radiating everywhere.” Some programs draw a greater proportion of locals than most, but often travelers from Chilliwack, Kamloops or Vancouver join the educational programs.

The centre’s disproportionate ability to draw funding and fans has been a good thing, and its reputation has spread. Hope Mountain Centre has been asked to run events and programming in schools throughout the Lower Mainland.

“I've always liked that idea about us, that we're maybe boxing a little bit above our weight,” Pearce said. Funding- and population-wise, an organization that only drew attention in Hope might not have the same kind of muscle.

Focusing on Hope

But while the Hope Mountain Centre has gained a wider audience in recent years, Pearce and the leadership of the centre have kept one eye on the town itself. The official mandate of the centre was to create education, conservation, and recreation opportunities. The unofficial one? Making these things part of the community’s identity. That local-first focus is also one that the centre is planning to refocus on in the future.

“We had a not-so-hidden agenda from the very beginning, of wanting to change the culture of Hope,” Pearce said. “So we weren't just another struggling resource town mourning the loss of their last sawmill.”

In the town’s economic glory days, up to six sawmills at once ran in Hope, employing hundreds and forming the backbone of the town’s economy. But that era is long over.

Stories of dwindling former resource towns are a dime a dozen throughout the province. But there are also tales of economic transformation. Some towns—like the sawmill-town-turned-rock-climbing-mecca Squamish—have turned their fortunes around by promoting the very nature they once so successfully harvested.

Pearce wants Hope to shift in a similar direction. And he believes that process is already underway, partly as a result of the Hope Mountain Centre and the people it has drawn out to Hope.

“I think people in Hope see their town much differently. They see the trails and the wonderful natural resources, and people are starting to move here because they're attracted to this lifestyle.”

Narrowing Focus

That focus on the community of Hope and the surrounding region will likely play a renewed role in the centre’s next few years. When the centre’s executive director Kristine Perez de Leon looks at the future of the centre and the town, she’s looking for ways to narrow the charity’s focus. And that may mean rededicating the centre to Hope-based programs.

“I feel like a lot of people are always focused on growth, which is really great, and has its time and place,” she said. “But for Hope Mountain Center, what I'm currently working on and hoping for is stability.”

Perez de Leon has been running the Hope Mountain Centre for three years. Having spent more than a decade leading environmental non-profits, she has seen how things have changed since the pandemic. Funding is harder and harder to obtain. Belts are tightening everywhere.

The Hope Mountain Centre has been doing a lot for such a small organization, Perez de Leon said, but doing so many different things is proving difficult for the centre’s small team and budget.

“We're trying to rein in our scope a bit, and just focus really well on those key programming areas so that we can then sustainably build upon them.”

Key programming areas include many things the centre was founded upon—including local educational programming, recreation projects, and conservation. But cuts to some activities, particularly those that have grown based on the reputation of the centre outside of Hope, seem likely. For example, Perez de Leon says, the centre has provided programming or spoken at events or schools in the Lower Mainland, as far away as Vancouver, in the past. It will be doing fewer of those visits in the future.

“I feel like [that] detracts from what our mission is, which is Hope and north, east, and south of it,” Perez de Leon said. “We're really trying to focus on the lesser served areas.”

Perez de Leon hopes changing the centre’s concentration like this will let the centre operate more efficiently and effectively in the years to come. Alongside serving more local causes, she also wants to make some programming less expensive—or free—for Hope locals. Education and recreation help people build connections with the land, she knows, and it’s that connection—and the instinct for conservation that arises from it—that the Hope Mountain Centre was designed, above all, to instill.

“We believe really strongly in the fact that the more you know and experience and feel a connection to a place, the more you want to protect it.”