Black Girls Run! (BGR) are on the move. Saturday, Jan. 7, a number of the members will be running a New York Road Runners (NYRR) 10k race in Central Park, and will run with NYRR again on Jan. 21 in the Manhattan Half Marathon.
Staying on the run, ladies from BGR chapters around the country will be in New Orleans, where they will participate in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon and Half Marathon series.
And we want to make a correction. We noted in the AmNews Dec. 22 that Juanne Harris was the founding president of the New York Chapter of BGR. Harris, in fact, along with Nykia Crute, is a New York “Ambassador,” assisting in managing the day-to-day activities of the New York chapter’s running group that includes outreach to new members, planning events and coordinating weekly group runs with Group Run Leaders.
BGR was founded in 2009 by Harlem resident Ashley Hicks and her best friend, Toni Carey, as a blog to document their running journey and in an effort to tackle the growing obesity epidemic in the African-American community, especially among Black women. BGR’s mission, according to Hicks and Carey, is “to encourage African-American women to make fitness and healthy living a priority.”
Running groups were launched in the spring of 2011 and since then the movement has expanded into a national advocacy and networking organization providing encouragement, support and resources to both new and veteran runners. BGR has chapters in 40 cities, more than 7,000 Facebook “likes” and nearly 3,000 followers on Twitter, and has encouraged thousands of Black women to take up long distance running.