Youth in Williams Lake could have an accessible outdoor space to freely watch or race their RCs at Boitanio Park this summer.
Derek Godin is a child and youth care worker at the Cariboo Chilcotin Child Development Centre.
He says although he did not know much about RCs when he started working at the Centre, he was eventually able to learn more about them as they run an RC program.
“The more I broke and the more I had to fix so it’s just an evolution of getting into it bit by bit, and a friend of my Shawn Lewis who’s the President of the Williams Lake Mountain Bike Association, he basically came to me and was like hey we have this piece of land that has been allocated to use, but we have no use for this section. He said if the City allows you to work this area of the property I give you total use to build an RC park if you want.”
The fantastic idea according to Godin just snowballed from there with him delivering a presentation this week to Williams Lake Council who supported it in principle and referred it to the Community Services Committee for discussion with staff and a report back to Council.
“I have to wait on the City to get back to me,” he says in terms of what’s next.
“I’m going to up write a letter for donations to different businesses and people in town to basically get as much as I can donated to save on the costs and start talking to my youth. When the snow melts, Shawn and I will go out with some of the other mountain bike members and we’re going to measure everything off, mark it off, and start digging, and hopefully get the City to help with some of that.”
The proposed Race Track that was a successful ICSI grant applicant last month will according to Godin have any required work and maintenance done by him, his clients, and RC enthusiasts.
He’s hoping that the Track which would be complete for the summer, could come with power for charging stations, some lighting, and also signage reminding users that the track is not for gas or nitro RCs.
“I started with the Child Development Centre last year and kind of picked up RCs pretty fast. With a lot of the youth on my caseload especially that’s how I connect with them is through RCs,” Godin says.
“So we’ll go down to the skate park or the bike park and we just RC for our session. The youth basically they kind get lost in the RC and don’t realize exactly what it is they are saying a lot of the time so you end up getting a little more truthful and a little bit more information than you normally would if you’re just having a conversation with them.”
“It helps us to bridge that gap between adult, mentor, and youth. It gives the adult a chance to be a kid and the kid the chance to be an adult.”