The R.A.C.E. Run – Race for Awareness, Courage and Empowerment

The R.A.C.E. Run – Race for Awareness, Courage and Empowerment – is Fleur O’Conner’s Bat Mitzvah project. Read more from Fleur….

In September, at my Bat Mitzvah, I talked about wanting to sponsor a young girl from Kenya and give her the opportunity to come to Halifax and experience life here.  My hope was to find a girl around my age who could come and live with us for a few weeks, attend school and participate in activities in Halifax.  Through the research to get connected with the right people we realized that making a trip to Kenya should be part of our journey.  In early March my family and I travelled to Kenya and visited Iten, which is the small town where many world class runners come from.  We met Monicah Kiplagat (who we knew was interested in our project) and she agreed to allow her daughter, Dorothy, to come to Halifax.  The exciting news is that Dorothy is en route to Halifax now!

Since my Bat Mitzvah I have been working with my family on some different fundraising projects. All the money raised goes towards bringing Dorothy to Halifax. We worked with a world class runner from Iten, Johana Karienkei, who came to Halifax in 2015 and ran the Bluenose. He has a small business that makes custom bead bracelets for people all over the world.  Since Dorothy will be coming to school at Armbrae we had him make a bracelet with the Canada and Kenya flag and “Armbrae” on it.  We sold these to students at school and raised almost $1000.  We recently fitted everyone with their bracelets at a special assembly and the students were so excited.

Our big fundraiser is a race that we are organizing, called The R.A.C.E. Run – Race for Awareness, Courage and Empowerment.  We are holding this race on Sunday, April 23rd, at Point Pleasant Park.  Dorothy will be at the race to cheer everyone on at the start and she will also be running the race with me, hand in hand. There will also be surprises at the race for all participants! We are hoping this experience will be a cultural exchange for anyone who participants in the race.  We are so excited that we have more than 70 participants!  You are welcome to come join us to run OR walk the 5K race on April 23rd.  Check out the registration page below and register to be a part of making this dream come true for Dorothy.  If you don’t want to run please consider coming out to cheer, volunteer or even donate.

You can sign up for everything at our registration site.

https://raceroster.com/events/2017/12165/the-race-run

I hope you will get to meet Dorothy!