Organizing Committee
Hello Competitors, Faculty, Sponsors and All Avid GNCTR Supporters,
The 2024 Great Northern Concrete Toboggan Race (GNCTR) Organizing Committee (OC) is incredibly proud of the opportunity to host GNCTR 2024 in our beautiful home province of Newfoundland & Labrador this upcoming February in our provincial capital, St. John's. Our non-profit OC is comprised of a passionate group of volunteers that are all GNCTR and Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN) Engineering alumni. Our OC is excited to give back to a competition that had a profound impact on each of us and are eager to showcase Newfoundland & Labrador's hospitality & unique culture for engineering students across Canada. This year will mark the 50th Anniversary of GNCTR and our OC believes there is no better location to celebrate this significant milestone than to host GNCTR in Atlantic Canada for the first time in its history.
GNCTR is truly a unique spectacle. It is a competition that exudes spirit and comradery, creating a community where students across the country come together to share their common interests and passion for engineering. GNCTR also provides a competitive environment where students demonstrate their technical skillset as they race their concrete toboggans annually on Race Day and provide learning opportunities to students that extend beyond the classroom. In it's 50-years, GNCTR has continuously improved and changed to always provide a better experience for students. The GNCTR 2024 OC is committed to maintaining that mindset of continuous improvement and have provided some examples below of the proactive measures being established to ensure a safe, inclusive, and positive environment for all involved at GNCTR 2024.
The safety of our competitors is of the utmost importance and GNCTR has taken significant strides over the years where there has been a focused effort on improving the safety of Race Day for competitors. This year, our OC wants to extend that mindset to the GNCTR event as a whole and incorporate safety into each day. Our OC will provide students 24/7 emergency phone numbers, concise lines of communication for reporting concerns to the OC and have accessible mental health resources and professional services for all students to avail of.
Our OC fondly remembers the comradery that GNCTR provided them as students, and we want to ensure that GNCTR continues to be an inclusive environment for all. As such, we have partnered with Diversity NL, a local organization whose primary function is to increase diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace, to create a training course unique to GNCTR pertaining to DE&I and sexual violence awareness. We will share this course with all parties that will be attending GNCTR including students, faculty, volunteers, sponsors, judges, OC, etc. and it is mandatory for this training be completed by all prior to attending GNCTR 2024.
We also recognize that this event is associated with planned night events at venues that serve alcohol under their own liquor licenses. Our OC would like to formally reiterate that the spirit component evaluation is strictly about promoting the inclusive comradery that we are all striving for, and that the evaluation of competitor spirit will not be associated with the consumption of alcohol. This is reinforced in Section 11 of the official GNCTR 2024 Rulebook.
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It will be expected for all GNCTR 2024 attendees to read, understand, and adhere to behavior policies and codes of conduct as outlined by our OC as well as by student’s respective home Universities, and to uphold the honour, integrity, and interests of the Professional Engineer designation in Canada. These policies include, but are not limited to, physical, verbal, and sexual harassment, discrimination, violence, and equity, diversity, and inclusion.
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We look forward to welcoming everyone to St. John’s, NL, in February 2024 and to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of GNCTR together, in our completely unbiased opinion, in the best province of Canada, Newfoundland & Labrador!
On behalf of the Great Northern Concrete Toboggan Race 2024 Organizing Committee,
Mark Rowsell & Regan Hogan
Co-Chairs, GNCTR 2024 Organizing Committee Inc.
