PayDirt - Here’s a List of Organizations that Hit PayDirt for 2020. 2

Spanning three continents, and encompassing a wide variety of groups from land trusts to national advocacy organizations to high school race teams and grassroots trail builders, PayDirt's recipients include a number of Santa Cruz's long-standing beneficiaries and adds several more both in North America and internationally.

“Multiple community” trail development projects:

• Ridgeline (Castelnuovo di Garfagnana, Lucca, Italy) is creating a new public access trail network for bike tourism together with the government bodies of the Garfagnana and the National Parks of the area.
• Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship’s (Sierra, Plumas, Lassen and Butte County, CA) Connected Communities project will link 15 towns within four economically disadvantaged counties in the Sierra-Nevada Mountains of California, creating 300 miles of motorized and non-motorized dirt trails.

Iconic trail development projects:

• Tweed Valley Trail Association (Tweed Valley, Scotland, UK) will be renovating and improving the Reservoir climb, which gives access to the Golfie trails in the area.
• Nelson MTB Club (Nelson, New Zealand) will be constructing a brand new descent in the Maitai Forest, which will boast over over 9,800 feet of trail, making it one of New Zealand's longest single-track descents. 
  
• Northwest North Carolina Mountain Bike Alliance (Edgemont, NC) is renovating the popular Yancey Ridge Trail in the up and coming Grandfather District of Pisgah National Forest.

Programs geared at strengthening inclusive and diverse community building:

• Grow Cycling Foundation (Los Angeles, CA) is building a pumptrack to serve as an offline community hub that will be an entry point for people who may ride bikes, but never knew they could, or had the opportunity to, take cycling further. This is a long-term journey and Grow Cycling Foundation is also looking to provide education, access, and opportunities to tear down the barriers to entry in cycling for marginalized communities.
• NorCal High School Cycling League (Petaluma, CA) has been funded to create DEI (Diversity, Equality, Inclusion) education tools for their coaches, and expand their GRiT [Girls Riding Together] program to include ten female ambassadors from diverse geographic regions who represent diverse racial identity and diverse body types.

Newly needed fire restoration efforts:

• Mountain Bikers of Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, CA) will be working on fire restoration efforts with the State Parks, and focusing efforts on building a new pumptrack on the Westside of Santa Cruz.

Seed funding to support small, but growing organizations:

• Chablais Bike Association (Morzine, France) is raising funds to build a pump track in the Morzine town hall.
• Enduro Jura (Saint CLaude, Jura, France) wants every volunteer to have a tool in one hand and a beer in the other.

In-kind donation to create more access to trail building:

• Whistler Off Road Cycling Association (Whistler, CAN) and Mountain Bikers Of Santa Cruz both received two Heckler e-bikes for use by their trail crew in order to make their resources and efforts go further in maintaining their trail networks.

Long-time Santa Cruz partners the Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship is using their PayDirt grant to help fund an ambitious 300-mile trail project in the Lost Sierra region of California near the town of Downieville.

To see the full list of grantees, and to learn more about each organization and the cool stuff they’ll be doing, check out the PayDirt page.