Four-star Charity Rating for WTA

And the winners are (drum roll, please) … trails!

Charity Navigator, the nation's largest charity evaluator, recently awarded Washington Trails Association a third consecutive 4-star rating in its annual report on the nation's nonprofit organizations. That's their highest possible rating.

According to Charity Navigator, their rating system is designed to help donors give with confidence. They examine and rate the financial health of nonprofit organizations, considering both how responsibly a charity functions day-to-day and how poised the organization is to sustain its positive results over the long term. To see how WTA stacks up against other environmental nonprofits ranked in Washington, click here.

One factor helping WTA earn its high marks is the efficiency of our operations, with less than 8 percent spent on fundraising. When you’re faced with coordinating more than 80,000 hours of volunteer labor in more than 750 trail work parties each year, you learn a lot about how to be efficient and make each dollar go the mile—literally.

From our perspective, though, the most important factor in the 4-star rating is that WTA gets results (to see more of what our volunteers achieved in 2008, click here).

Whether we’re rebuilding trails from Mount Rainier to Cape Disappointment, or offering the most up-to-date trail information on our website, every gift we receive directly benefits hikers and trails. We’ve always worked hard to make sure our members' contributions are put to work effectively—on-trail and in Olympia—and we’re honored to receive this recognition yet again from one of the nation’s leading charity evaluators.

To help us get 2009 off to a good start, you can help WTA with a year-end gift. Give back to the trails you love with a tax-deductible contribution.

You can trust WTA to put your donation to work efficiently and effectively. In fact, we’re so darn efficient that our volunteers aren’t even taking a break on New Year’s Day! On January 1, you’ll find them hard at work taking care of trails in the Issaquah Alps.

Thanks for your support—we couldn’t do it without you!