They’re a club of friends looking for adventure.
“It started off in 2011, a group of friends wanting to get together to start climbing mountains, getting into the outdoors,” says Black Flag Summit Club member Rommel Agbay.
The Black Flag Summit Club is made up of buddies from B.C., Alberta and Washington State who for the past few years have been sharing their hiking adventures online. Their Instagram account now boasts over 7,000 followers.
“At the beginning of the pandemic we decided to start an Instagram account [and] started posting photos of our trips as a way to again document what we’ve been up to,” says Agbay.
“We really had no aspirations for where it was going to go,” adds fellow club member Miguel Rodriguez.
“We thought that this was a good way to get outside and stay in touch because everybody has moved to different cities and stuff.”
Soon the group began to look for ways to use their following to support a local charity. That’s when they came up with an idea to sell custom patches.
“People kept seeing these pictures of our patches and were writing to us saying ‘hey can we buy one of these patches,'” says Rodriguez.
“We thought ‘hey maybe this is a way that we can somehow channel this to do some good work for our community.'”
The 100 patches quickly sold out, with the over $2,000 raised going to the Take a Hike Foundation. The organization supports vulnerable youth through outdoor experiential learning.
“We engage them in our core pillars of intentional clinical counselling, experiential learning and the outdoors, individualized academics and community engagement,” says Take a Hike Vancouver Island’s manager of philanthropy Charlene Smith.
Initiatives like the patch fundraiser are crucial to help keep the foundation going.
“We love when community members and groups come to us with these amazing creative projects and ideas,” says Smith.
“When Black Flag Summit Club reached out to us and shared this amazing campaign that they had developed and that they wanted to support us we were just so grateful.”
For more information on the Take a Hike Foundation, visit their website online here.
Cole Sorenson
