Discussion: Adventure Running Kids needs your votes!

Thanks to the AP and international orienteering community Adventure Running Kids is sitting in 3rd place (we think) with only 5 days of voting left (voting ends on Feb 29th). The gap to 2nd is increasing and 4th is gaining on us quickly (and it is from a group that is the town adjacent to Hamilton).

Placing in the top three would be awesome. Winning would be really good for our sport and we would get free access to a major consulting firm for strategic plan development worth several $K.

You can vote on all five of our submissions each hour.

We really appreciate the support!

So cool to have an orienteering program get this recognition. Thanks for your continued support.

http://dontgetlost.ca/vote

Quick question: is it the top ARK submission that is important or all of them totaled together or some other system entirely?

The winner is determined by the total of ALL five of their submissions. So each time a person votes if they have time to vote on all five ARK submissions that would be great.

Once you sign in do a search on ARK and the ARK five submissions will appear and you can vote on each of them separately.

Thanks for the support everyone!

Keep voting everyone! It means so much to the kids! So exciting for our program!

Is there a way to vote without each one showing up on my Facebook wall?

Yeah, instead of logging in through facebook, set up an account from the 'login' page with your email address. Result, no epic facebook spam.

Bret just got his Oscar, so as promised a few more votes for ARK.

>Bret just got his Oscar,
Glad we could help!

:-)

Three more days of voting! This award has already translated into about 10 new kids for our program as the parents wrote that they found out about ARK from local people's choice award press coverage.

Thanks everyone!

10 new kids via the press coverage - awesome!!

Well, I don't know if it was due to Brit's win, but there has been a boost in votes for Adventure Running Kids today (especially since the other side of the world has woken up), great to see that a big group of athletes know how to finish strong!
Whoever has been voting, you're all awesome! Only 2 days to go, so keep it up!

Fantastic! Keep voting everyone!!

I suppose I should have done this at the start of the process but I just gave the vote a plug via the QOC Yahoo group. Hopefully contributes a little bit to a good finishing kick.

BTW, I've been voting since day 1 but I only just got around to watching one of the videos a few minutes ago - nice production values, BTW. If the estimates so far have been based on number of times the videos have been played, I haven't been showing up in them. Here's hoping I'm one of a huge up till now not silent majority but blind plurality.

Edit: so blind, in fact, I hadn't noticed only one of the five submissions was a video. Oh well, so much for that bit of wishful thinking.

Thanks Jon for the support. Yes each group has five submissions. Three photos, one video and one text. The text submission doesn't have a view counter and the video isn't capturing the views for most groups in the numbers that the photo submissions area.

This has been a long process so we are very thankful to the O community for the support. The process has provided our sport some great exposure so far. Voting ends on Wed. at midnight. Winner announced by Friday. Hoping ARK is in the top 3 (which we think we are).

I've been voting as often as I remember over the past couple of days, because I think ARK is a totally awesome program. I hope ARK is near the top, too!

Thanks Cristina. We think it is awesome too. Adventure Running Kids is currently on a few week hiatus in between our winter and spring sessions. The Wadd Squad household aren't sure what we are going to do this week without our weekly dose of ARK. Kids that are signed up for three sessions get over 25 sessions on map trainings. I think about 70 kids sign up for all three sessions. We had 155 in the autumn and are at 125 for the spring but still three weeks of registration to go. The exposure the OTF nomination has provided has helped boost numbers. But what is especially cool are comments from parents on the OTF awards page. It is very rewarding when you read how parents see their kids self confidence getting a boost.

When we developed the ARK curriculum we focused on participation to allow kids to not only run more and learn their nav but to stress the importance of building life skills like problem solving and self confidence. Cool to see the parents are seeing that in their kids.

Somewhere along the line of my 32 year teaching career I figured out that about the most important thing we teachers/coaches/parents could do for kids is help them build their self confidence- help them feel good about themselves.
Children and youth who feel good about themselves feel more inclined to self improvement and most importantly they do not feel inclined to bully others to establish their 'place' in their social pecking order.
I'll bet there are no bullies among the ARK kids, just a whole bunch of kids who feel good about how muddy and wet they got and feel great about the camaraderie.

nicely worded Gord. Last summer I remember talking to Brian May about Adventure Running Kids and asking his advice from his JackRabbit coaching experience in XC skiing. He said something like "in JackRabbits the goal isn't to develop cross country skiers the goal is to develop kids".

So true.

Last day of voting!

Voting has closed! Thanks so much to the AP community for your support of GHO's Adventure Running Kids program. We greatly appreciate it and so do the ARK participants and their equally supportive parents and coaches!

Yep, what Hammer said. We're a much smaller program that a lot of the groups we were up against and we weren't expecting to do that well, but seeing us hold our own against other groups that seemed to have entire school boards voting in a bloc and the mayor of their town tweeting to 1000's of followers has been pretty cool.
It's been so awesome to see the international community come together and support this program, so thanks again.

Will you let us know the results when they're released? Or do you know yet?

we were just notified that the top 5 vote getters will likely be announced tomorrow.
We are expecting to be in 2nd based on the assumption that views are loosely related to votes. There were about 55,000 votes made in the two week period.

Thanks again everyone. We just hit 150 kids for our spring session in Hamilton with two of the three time slots already sold out and still three weeks to the session starts.

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It is official. ARK finished second. Thank you for the tremendous support. Details to follow - www.dontgetlost.ca

wooooweeeee!!! Fantastic!

Congrats!

I love that your focus is first and foremost on getting kids running in the woods & getting muddy & having fun (while working/playing hard too).

Interesting to see that you're pitching running outside to hockey teams in the off-season as a better way to build more-relevant strength as well as endurance than just running on a track.

Full article
A big thanks again to everyone. The attackpoint fraternity was vital in this competition.