In an email sent out this morning, the organizers of the Echelon Gran Fondo announced their decision to push the event back to 2012.

Here’s what Hunter Ziesing said in his email:

We would like to extend our apologies to the Tucson community and our Arizona followers in that we are pushing the Tucson Challenge and Gran Fondo to May of 2012. While Echelon did extensive work on venue planning, course preparation, traffic control, marketing, etc, given the short time window we did not effectively engage our charitable partner there to the point where we saw enough momentum to produce the Challenge. While the Gran Fondo on its own (up Mt Lemmon) would be successful, we feel that holding both events in 2012 will be more cost effective and allow for a much larger net donation.

On a positive note, working with the city, county, park officials and the community at large in Tucson has been a great experience.  Everything is in place to produce a super sized event in 2012 where we will have more sufficient time to work with our charitable partner there.

If you would like to enter any of our 5 other events (as a fundraiser), we will offer you the ability to fundraise for your own charity where half of your net donations will go to a Charity of Choice. The other half will remain with the local beneficiary of the city/event that you enter.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Sincerely,

Hunter Ziesing
Echelon Gran Fondo

I’ll try to get more info soon.

One thought on “Gran Fondo postponed; charitable donation concerns cited”
  1. people should be optimistic, even the Gran Fondo postponed still it will proceed. And the good thing about here is that many people will come and join the event to make the concerns for charity lesser and the outcome will be good.

    Suzanne Robinson,
    Car Donation
    Wheels for Wishes

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