Walking Group Finds Playful Ways to Keep Black Women Healthy
By NICOLE WALLACE
Features Editor
October 20, 2013 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Drawing on the inspiration of icons in African-American history, GirlTrek is rallying black women and girls across the country to start walking. The goal is to combat conditions like heart disease, stroke, and diabetes, which affect large numbers of black women.
“Walking has always been a way that black communities have come together to create social change, everything from the Civil Rights movement to Harriet Tubman literally walking herself to freedom,” says Vanessa Garrison, the nonprofit’s co-founder.
GirlTrek has set an ambitious goal to get a million women and girls walking by 2018. The organization relies on local volunteers, partnerships with black churches and the NAACP, and social media to spread the word. So far, more than 18,000 people have registered as walkers on GirlTrek’s Web site, and more than 155,000 people follow the group on Facebook.
The three-year-old organization takes a playful approach to its mission. The group’s 30-Day Jumpstart Challenge features a checklist of 48 kinds of treks, including “with my boo, on a date.” The idea is to help participants think of fun ways to incorporate walking into their everyday lives. Participants who complete 20 of the walks in 30 days enter GirlTrek’s Golden Shoelace Society and receive a pair of golden shoelaces labeled “GirlTrek Walking Warrior.”
“These are in such hot demand, we can’t keep them in stock,” says Ms. Garrison.
In 2012, GirlTrek received $125,000 as winner of Teach for America’s Social Innovation Award, and this past summer the group’s co-founders were accepted into the Echoing Green Fellowship program. The group’s budget for 2013 was $275,000, which came primarily from individuals and foundations.
The key to GirlTrek’s approach is building a network of grass-roots organizers, says T. Morgan Dixon, the group’s other co-founder.
She points to Faye Paige Edwards, a woman in her late 50s from St. Louis, who attended a GirlTrek training program in May for local activists. Since then, she has signed up more than 900 walkers, including her sister and 90-year-old mother. Ms. Edwards’s sister, in turn, has gotten 39 churches in Philadelphia to start GirlTrek walking groups.
“There’s no way that a team of national people could effect the change that Faye in St. Louis is effecting,” says Ms. Dixon. “If we can just do that 20, 30, 50 times over across the country, then we have a movement.”
