Tell Us Your Story. What motivated you to start your business? Why are you passionate about what you do?

With 20+ years of fitness and athletics background, I had always had the dream of opening a fitness facility that prioritized community and inclusiveness while supporting and promoting an active and healthy lifestyle. Wild+United is unique in that our focus is in building a fitness mindset that can grow along with a client and positively benefit them for the long term. Our passionate and highly trained team of coaches help to promote an inclusive, dynamic, non-judgemental, and motivating community. Seeing clients support each other, achieve goals and push themselves towards new ones is infinitely rewarding and is what keeps me and the entire coaching staff excited about doing what we do every day.

Describe and demonstrate, including metrics, your community support. How do you support and uplift your community, and how do they show that support in return? Minimum 25 words, maximum 2500 characters.

Our primary community is our actual membership. We, the coaches and our management team, as well as class participants celebrate each other’s accomplishments and milestones in a few different ways. 1.We have an illustrious photo wall of our members' names and faces in our lobby to remind us why we do what we do. Their smiling faces provide us with continuous inspiration. 2. Wild+United has a 100, 500 and 1000 Club which recognizes gym members who have put in these hours here with us and done the work to meet their goals. They are celebrated in class with announcements, and showered with gifts that are locally sourced. 3. We have a “member of the month” series that we publish on our social media which highlights individuals in our gym that make us and others around them happy to be here. 4. We have a Pay What You Can program in which anyone in our gym and the community can take part by emailing us a request to be in a quarterly draw to receive a discounted membership for a three month period. We feel support and love from our community every day. Our business is now in its third location, as of this past May, and an indication of our membership’s support was how they helped us move over 17,000 lbs of equipment from our old space to our new one in under 2 hours using strength and muscles they built up here with us while working out. It was a joyous illustration of mutual support and admiration - theirs for us and ours for them! Another example of our membership support also has to do with our Pay What You Can program. Full members are allowed to place their memberships on "hold" when they need to and bank their “away” days towards their membership fees upon their return, but we now allow them to, instead of banking their days, donate them towards a pool of donated days that we then use for our PWYC members. This allows them to support both us and other community members. In our community at large, we support local events as they come up by donating merchandise and memberships or in the case of the Pull for Pride event, actually hosting this fundraiser for a couple of years.

Why do you deserve to win the Business Impact award?

A lot of businesses like ours, gyms specifically, have a business model that involves selling many memberships and counting on members not showing up so they have more space to sell even more memberships. Our model is not like this - we want our members to show up and we want them to make their lives better through health, fitness and community. We are a small business but we make a big difference in the lives of those who are around us. When you ask a question like this, “why do you deserve to win this award”, I have to answer that it’s our entire team that deserves this because we are all focussed on the same goals. A business like this one is built on passion as well as compassion and the coaches and management team who work with me at Wild+United are absolutely dedicated to helping those around them live better, healthier and more fulfilling lives. For this reason, I believe Wild+United Athletics deserves to win this award.

Tell Us About Your Culture. How are you creating a sustainable and healthy workplace where everyone feels welcome? Provide examples of leadership you show in interactions with clients, vendors, contractors, staff and others.

The Wild+United culture is built upon a foundation of inclusivity, diversity and support for all people - coaches, administration and clients alike. It is not uncommon to see member Jan (she/her-72 years old) working out beside member Nathan (he/him-46 years old) in a class coached by (Mal they/them-27 years old). We host programs like Queer Lifting, Queer Mobility, Be Legendary (50+), Wise and United(60+) and Teen Lifting. Additionally, there is a course called Strong as a Mother for postpartum moms and their babies to attend. This class particularly offers new moms a social connection as well as a return to fitness training and is one of our most popular programs. This highlights our dedication to offering our services to all clients regardless of age, gender, body type, fitness level and ability. A typical start to any group class involves the warm up and a “question of the day” that is asked by the coach. Each class participant is then invited to answer after they introduce themselves and offer their pronouns (ie: My name is John and my pronouns are he/him.) We then go around the room until everyone who wants to has answered the often funny but insightful question. This small act of offering and accepting pronouns goes a long way to showing each other that we all matter and are valuable. For some of our senior-specific classes, this can be an eye-opening experience into what today’s society looks like, and their willingness to learn and accept this, as shown to them by their coaches, is a significant step forward.