WWF Annual Report
Click here to read the 2025 Annual Report!
A letter from the President:
When I step onto a trail, the first mile is always the loudest. My mind is still carrying the week, with its deadlines, its leftover tasks, its unfinished conversations - and it takes time for that noise to settle. But it always does. Somewhere along the way the path quiets me enough to notice where I actually am. Looking back on 2025, I feel something similar: this was the year Wilderness Ways grew quiet enough to see clearly just how far we've come.
I write this as the Foundation's new president, having taken the baton from our fearless leader and Co-founder Jim Hopkins this past January. The organization I get to lead today is far more matured and in tune with itself than the one I joined back in 2022. I'm grateful to follow him.
By nearly every measure, 2025 was our most meaningful year yet. For the first time in our history we raised more than $10,000 ($10,991, to be exact) and almost three-quarters of it came from beyond our own board. That second detail matters more to me than the total. It means our message is reaching past the people who built this organization and finding a home with a growing community of supporters.
Those gifts did not sit still. Over the year we distributed more than $6,000 to the widest circle of partners we've ever supported! Among them Wild Hearts Idaho, whose funding helped send a group of teen girls on a multi-day backpacking expedition; City Kids, Free to Run, Algalita Everyone Outside, and a Wilderness Journeys scholarship. All this alongside land-acknowledgement gifts to twelve Indigenous-serving organizations whose stewardship makes these experiences possible.
We close the year on solid ground: healthy reserves, new members joining our board, and a clearer sense than ever of who we are. In 2026 we'll keep tending both halves of our mission: Communicating the awesome outcomes of transformational wilderness experiences, while widening the circle of people who get to benefit from them.
The wilderness has a way of returning us to ourselves — steadier, clearer, more connected than when we set out. That is the gift we are trying, in our own small way, to offer others. Thank you for walking this trail with us. The path ahead is wide open, and we’re glad you’re on it.
With gratitude,
Christoff M. Polagnoli
President, Wilderness Ways Foundation
