AGM & Presidential Report
On March 4th we held our AGM. Thank you to all that attended. We look forward to moving forward with our board and welcoming our newest board member, Ashleigh Taylor to the board. If you would like to access minutes or financial report, please contact us via email.
Presidential Report
I want to start off my thanking you all for joining us for our AGM. And before we begin to celebrate our horses and riders and discuss 2024, I want to extend a huge thank you to our Board; Shauna Adamson, Justine Annandale, Elysia Allos, Karly McRae, Natalie Hewson, Cheryl Keith, Ali Buchanan, Natalie Hewson, Jenna BrownJohn, Cassandra Thorsteinson and Stephanie Kallstrom. Everything that is accomplished for the BCHJA is done by our board members who volunteer their time and efforts. I want to extend a sincere and very large thank you to each of you for all that you do. This organization would not be able to do what we can without you.
2023 was certainly an exciting and successful year for BCHJA and its riders. We were able to celebrate these successes with our annual BCHJA Gala at Newlands Golf Course. The Gala brought Gold & Bronze level riders together to celebrate themselves, each other and allowed the community to recognize members of the equestrian community who have inspired us all. With our prizes, ribbons, photo booth, delicious dinner, and diverse silent auction, we are very excited to continue with the gala this year. Our riders also found great success outside of British Columbia. Many of our riders competed and excelled at the Royal West this year and rode beautifully in their medal classes, derbies and hunter jumper classes. And at our national finals event, the Royal Winter Fair, our riders shone incredibly bright. Young rider Colby Winther Konig captured the finals win in both the Jump Canada and CET Medal Finals with Sloane Betker, a previous Jump Canada finals winner, finishing second in the CET. BCHJA was proud to support BC riders who made the journey to Toronto with our travel funding program, and we look forward to continuing to support our athletes this year.
In 2023 we proudly had over 400 members and currently we are at 205 members so far this year. Please continue to encourage your barn mates and clients to get their membership. It is important to note that for BCHJA year end points to count, riders and their respective trainers, must be members of the BCHJA prior to the Sunday of the competition they wish to collect points for. We will not be back dating points this year, therefore to be safe, encourage your peers to get their memberships as soon as possible.
Our membership fee is now $50. This was raised from $45, the first price increase in many years, to help accommodate our events such as the gala and symposium and also to help fund the support of riders through our travel funding and bursary programs.
Many of our members have reached out with questions this year regarding classes and divisions that the BCHJA recognizes. We first introduced our bronze series program to help recognize riders at the grass roots level and we will continue to develop that program. As a board we made the decision to make one change to the divisions recognized at the gala. We will be splitting the modified child/adult into their own separate year end divisions. We made the decision to not further change the divisions we calculate points for to continue to align with the divisions recognized by Equestrian Canada.
As we move forward to 2024 I am excited to see the amount of bursary applications we have received. Many outstanding applicants have applied for our inaugural Gold & Bronze series bursaries. We look forward to reviewing the applications and announcing this year’s recipients next month.
In addition, 2024 will see the return of our Symposium and gala! As we get closer to the symposium we will announce our clinicians, date (November 2024) and application process. We are thrilled to once again be hosting this event at Thunderbird Show Park and look forward to having another very successful Gala at Newlands to celebrate all of the success, I know you will have in 2024.
Thank you all,
Nicola Gillam
BCHJA President