
Trailblazers of Bentonville, the nonprofit organization dedicated to building bicycle trails in northwest Arkansas (and which we reported on in last week’s issue), was formed in 1996 as the Bentonville/Bella Vista Trailblazers, which was soon shortened to NWA Trailblazers.
In 2021, NWA Trailblazers merged with BikeNWA, an advocacy group founded by Laura Kelly (as the Bicycle Coalition of the Ozarks) in 1999. After the merger, the combined organization rebranded as Trailblazers.
Trailblazers CEO Erin Rushing said the merger came about when he and BikeNWA CEO Paxton Roberts realized that the groups had shared goals. They began sharing an office in 2019 and officially merged two years later.
“We had actually been friends a long time, and we got to talking,” Rushing said. “We had the same struggles trying to run our own separate nonprofits, HR and accounting and financing and all the stuff associated with a nonprofit. One day we said, ‘You know what, you’ve got things I could use.’
“We could share a copier. We could share WiFi, we could share HR, we could share admin. We said, ‘Well, let’s move in together. We can save money.’”
Roberts stayed on as managing director in the new company. The pairing works because, as Rushing said, Roberts’ group was good at advocacy, which was something Trailblazers hadn’t been focused on while it built trails in the field.
“They were doing more programming, how to get kids on bikes and get adults on bikes, and advocating for more of the stuff we were building,” Rushing said. “We had our heads down, just trying to get it all developed and built so we weren’t advocating for ourselves. We had a plate full.
“We had to get more people on the trails, teach people, train people, and working together was the best thing we could have done to try to meet more people on bikes. Having our two teams collaborate on projects was really, really fun.”