To the Board of Directors
Adventure Cycling Association
June 21 2025
I am writing to you as a Life Member of Adventure Cycling and as a former 25-year employee, first as Publications Director (1975 to 1980) and then Executive Director (1981 to 2000).
I was astonished to learn yesterday through an email forwarded to me by a former Adventure Cycling tour leader that the Board of Directors plans to put the organization’s headquarters at 150 E. Pine up for sale.
As has been expressed in a letter — with which I concur — already sent to the Board by a group of co-founders and former staff members, this is a colossal mistake on the part of the Board. The headquarters building is an important symbol of the national organization. It has become synonymous with Adventure Cycling’s legacy and strong community roots in Montana’s “Bicycle Town” of Missoula. It has a national identity, and for years has been a landmark destination for cyclists from across America and around the world.
The headquarters building was acquired and remodeled with strong support from the Bikecentennial / Adventure Cycling Life Members, major donors, and the membership at large. It belongs to the members of the organization.
I can speak to the strong member support for the acquisition of the headquarters building, because I was the executive director charged by the then Board of Directors to form a building search committee within the staff, catalog the available properties in Missoula, and finally recommend the choice: the property at 150 E. Pine Street (then the home of the First Church of Christ, Scientist denomination). For the costs of renovation to office spaces I was able to successfully obtain HUD 312 loan funds; with additional months of bureaucratic red tape we received a code compliance matching grant that covered the independent construction inspections required when using HUD funds. In other words, it wasn’t a cake-walk.
The First Church of Christ, Scientist leaders agreed to carry the note with payments we were able to handle within our operational budget. We then created a Life Member program to bring in monies to pay off the building note eight years early, saving thousands in interest payments. The organization has thus enjoyed the full use of this building free and clear for many years. Yes, there have been maintenance upkeep costs; yes, there have been additional renovations, which I can’t speak to as they were done after I left the organization in 2000. But these renovations were paid off years ago.
Now to the question of the building being half-empty because much of the staff is spread across the country. This is another aspect of the Board clearly losing its way. How is the organization made stronger because it no longer has a cohesive staff working together in a single location? How has this “made us more representative of the country as a national organization,” as was stated in an email I received?
This organization has thrived in the past because it had strong staff leaders who attracted a core of enthusiastic people dedicated to bicycling, and, more importantly, dedicated to the members who saw the value in having a national organization supporting bicycle touring. Today, visiting cyclists often can’t even get a tour of the building if they don’t arrive in Missoula on the correct days.
I deduce from the email I received that Adventure Cycling has experienced a declining membership in recent years. And it’s no secret that there has been a succession of executive directors since 2020. A declining membership and staff turnover do not, to my mind, make selling the headquarters building a rational choice. Essentially, the organization is back to where it was in both staffing level and budget level when I departed in 2000. That’s not a disaster level; we ran an excellent program with that size of staff and budget from the time we acquired the headquarters building and into the early 2000s under new leadership.
If the headquarters building is sold, monies will be received, they’ll be dispersed to maintain staff and programs. And then what? Two or three years down the road the money will be gone, the building will be gone, and the organization will continue its death spiral.
It may interest you to know (as you may not have much of a grounding in the organization’s history) that Bikecentennial once before faced extinction. It was in the spring of 1977, in what should have been a highlight year, as we’d just come off the very successful summer of 1976, with some 4000 cyclists taking tours on all or major portions of the TransAmerica Bicycle Trail. Late in ’76, the decision was made to evolve from an event (the Bikecentennial tours) to an ongoing organization. We headed into 1977 with new projects and lots of willing and able staff members. By April of 1977, the financial implications were clear: nearly the entire staff of 35 would be gone within two weeks.
The then program director, David Prouty, was named Bikecentennial’s second executive director and handed the task of dissolving the organization. He was left with two staff to handle the mail, phone calls, and the few trips that had been sold for 1977. David enlisted former staff to help sell vehicles, desks, typewriters, and whatever else remained in the rented headquarters building; co-founder Greg Siple and I were offered contract work to continue the organization newsletter, the BikeReport, and create occasional publications.
Then David discovered the key to survival. He attended a three-day seminar on how not-for-profit organizations could use direct mail. I doubt any seminar has had a larger impact on a struggling not-for-profit. Direct mail was the predominant factor in the return of the organization. Slowly David was able to re-hire a few staff members, and eventually signed a lease on a new headquarters space, removing us from the decrepit old hotel that had housed the organization since 1974.
I mention all of this because when it looked like Bikecentennial would surely fold, a few committed, enthused staff members, working closely together, brought the organization back from the brink. We have been a resilient organization in the past. And we didn’t have the resources, the history, the legacy, and need I say it, the headquarters building, that the organization enjoys today.
It is the duty of the Board to consider the desires of the Life Members, the major donors, and the wider membership in making such a momentous decision as selling the headquarters that has become more than just a building housing organization staff. It’s time to step back, get strong staff leadership back into Missoula and the headquarters, attract staff who are enthusiastic about the goals of the organization, and move forward.
If this Board of Directors is not up to this task, then the Board members should step aside and let the membership select a Board that is enthusiastic about the future of the Adventure Cycling Association.
Sincerely yours,
Gary D. MacFadden
Former Executive Director — Bikecentennial/Adventure Cycling Association
Thank you Gary for sharing this history and the ‘can-do’ attitude in ACA’s bones.
ACA has been instrumental in my bicycling adventures both dreamed and real. I’ve cycled so many fantasy miles by reading ACA magazine over the years. It helped me see what was possible for others so I could try something ambitious and adventurous, but maybe not as incredible as cycling Africa from north to south or something. In real terms, the ACA route maps provided my outline for a more “modest” adventure, with a friend, from San Diego to Yorktown when I turned 60 in 2014.
In my opinion in the last 4 or 5 years, it seems the leadership after Mr. Sayer, has evolved a culture which estranged me from the previous ACA culture I’d loved. Most of the magazine articles involved non roadie adventures and other stories which younger folks could relate to, but not so much myself. I felt “aged out” and so I just figured that’s the way of things.
Having read the plan to breathe financial health and reinvigorate the organization, I am feeling more connected and positive towards the Adventure Cycling Organization and that ‘can-do philosophy to travel on a bike in Africa, the States or wherever.
A healthy leadership change for ACA from top-to-bottom, though painful initially, is the right answer. I think a renewed organization with open arms to all bicycle travelers and riders who love being on a bicycle and the sense of freedom it engenders is the direction for Adventure Cycling Association.
Selling the headquarters is ‘selling out’ on the members.
Thank you to all those looking to save ACA’s Headquarters! I had no idea such an effort was being undertaken until coming across an article on the subject just this morning. I immediately added my name to the petition.
I (was) a member since 2012 so I am a relative latecomer to ACA, but over the past few years, I have noticed the difference in the leadership and quality of the services provided by ACA. The announcement of sale of the HQ was the final straw in my decision to end my membership last year. Of course, that meant that I got no say whatsoever in whether ACA would or would not sell the Pine Street property.
I resonate strongly with Gary’s statement: “If this Board of Directors is not up to this task, then the Board members should step aside…” I believe that the problems with ACA go much deeper than this attempted building sale, but a greater issue with how ACA has been (mis)led over the past few years and a consistent tendency towards bad decisions contrary to the spirit and history of the organization.
Should this group find a way to stop this sale, I hope that the effort doesn’t end there because while I do believe that the sale of the HQ will accelerate the current death spiral of ACA, it will not in and of itself prevent the downward trajectory of the organization without a re-invigoration of the spirit and community that ACA was founded on.
Warmest Regards and Thank you,
-john