FEAT Canada's official bye-bye announcement

FEAT Canada has just released their official bye-bye announcement. Sean Verret and his team have been amazing. I'm copying their post below because it really sums up what goes into putting on a FEAT event.

Is it true? 

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably read either an email or social media post that says FEAT Canada and FEAT Kids are saying goodbye. Well what you have read is true and in the text below we’ll do our best to tell our story.

What have we done? 

 Before we say good bye, it’s worth realizing what we’ve created and how many people we’ve impacted. Since our first show in the Fall of 2011 we have hosted 7 adult shows and 4 kids shows. In total we’ve had 98 speakers, 11 sets of performers, and 11 MCs donate their time to help inspire you to get outside and test your limits. To put on those 11 shows our board of directors and over 200 volunteers have put in just over 10,000 hours of their time to entertain over 5000 live guests. Similarly, our online community of followers has reached nearly 5000 people including our newsletter and social media followers while our videos (including FEAT South Africa) have nearly 75,000 views since we started. Add all of those numbers up and we’ve reached nearly 100,000 people in one way or another during our tenure. Long story short, we’ve had impact. We’re extremely proud of this, and this makes it even harder to say goodbye. As Muhammad Ali once said, “Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on Earth”, so we hope by saying goodbye that our rent cheques don’t bounce in the future…

Can’t we just put on one more show? 

Before we made this release, the most asked question was, “How about just one more show?”. It’s a question we’ve asked ourselves almost every year… One of our favourite FEAT Speakers spoke about the difficulty of getting to the start line and that we should celebrate start lines more than finish lines. We’ve managed to smash through 11 start lines and every single one has had its challenges, but we did it. We did it with an extremely passionate board of directors, a dedicated team of volunteers, and some paid help when everything just got too overwhelming. Many will never know how hard it has been to get to the start line for each of our shows, but in short our shows are a year long endeavour that starts shortly after the end of our last show and ends with the beginning of our next show. We might not be smashing though any more start lines, but we are crossing a finish line today with huge smiles on our faces and a few tears running down our cheeks.

So why are we saying goodbye? 

 Each individual on our board has a variety of reasons of both why we should continue and why we should say good bye. The most compelling dialog, however, is that while we’ve been inspiring others to get outside and do amazing things, we’ve neglected to do some of those things ourselves. Our team has decided, that while it is important to inspire others to be awesome and do amazing things, it is also just as important to live the lives that we attempt to inspire others to live. For that reason, we will no longer continue to put on the FEAT Canada and FEAT Kids events in the future.

Thank you

The last thing we want to say is thank you. We want to thank every single person who has helped us put on our events especially our speakers, performers, volunteers and partners. We want to thank the thousands of people who’ve attended our shows and watched our videos online. We want to thank the thousands of people who’ve interacted with us online and put smiles our our faces. Our tears are big today, but our smiles are even bigger.

Thank you for being a part of the FEAT Canada and FEAT Kids community.

Your FEAT Board of Directors
Sean Verret – Founder and Chair
Tiffany Melius – Vice Chair
Tanya Verret – Treasurer
Jami Savage – Director at Large
Caroline Walter – Secretary