Write-up by Andrea Scarpino describing why and how she and her running partner raised funding for a Global Water project by running in the LA Marathon –

After my father died in July of 2007, I started running. I had run before, but now, I only felt brief moments of peace and a respite from my sadness while I was running. As the miles accumulated each week, I decided I might as well put my running to work and try to train for a race—and not a 5K or 10K, which I’d run before. I wanted to run a marathon. The hours of training that I knew I would have to put into the race were a welcome distraction, as was the time I spent researching training programs and the best foods to eat to fuel long runs. In a way, training to run a marathon was my therapy, my way to work through my grief.

My partner Zac has always been an athlete, and while he’d never run a marathon before, he agreed to train with me. At first, we weren’t sure we wanted to raise money as part of our marathon bid—what if one of us got injured and we weren’t able to race? Would we disappoint the people who contributed to our campaign? Would we have to give the money back? But in January 2008, with two months of training left before the Los Angeles Marathon, we both felt confident enough in the progress we had made to begin fundraising.

My father was a microbiologist whose work focused on water disinfection. In the 1970’s, he convinced the city of Cincinnati to build the first water treatment facility in the world that contained granular activated carbon, which not only removes organic material from water, but also reduces the amount of chlorine needed in disinfection by two thirds. He traveled to China, South Africa and through the Middle East as part of conferences and lecture series on water disinfection.. I knew that to honor his life’s work, Zac and I would have to fundraise for an organization that my father would have supported, an organization that advocates for clean water projects around the world.

I did some research online and quickly landed on Global Water. Ted, our Global Water contact, responded quickly when I first emailed him, provided detailed information about Global Water’s projects, and helped us narrow down a fundraising goal and project to help support. Zac and I felt immediately that we had a partner leading us through the fundraising process and as relative newcomers to the fundraising world, that was really important.

Ted originally suggested we aim for a goal of $1,000 to complete the funding needed for Global Water’s Healthy Schools Program in Guatemala. As my father was also a university professor who greatly valued education, funding a program that helped with sanitation and clean water projects in Guatemalan schools seemed like a perfect fit. However, Zac and I are optimists, and $1,000 didn’t seem like a large enough goal. Instead, we decided to aim for $2,500.

So, we wrote letters and emails to our friends and family members asking for their support, and created a web site that we updated weekly showing our progress. We suggested that people at least donate $26, which amounted to one dollar for every mile we would run in the marathon. However, we also developed an incentive for people to donate more by creating a special category of contributors we named “Nimble Nikes” (Nike referring to the goddess of victory, not to the shoe company). Nimble Nikes were people who donated $100 or more, and in exchange, were promised two gifts: a poem that I selected and a recipe selected by Zac that we typed on cardstock using our vintage avocado green Olympia typewriter and which we mailed ready to frame. We also created a raffle that every contributor was entered into, with prizes such as CD mixes that Zac and I created, books that we had read, and even an Ipod Mini.

The donations started coming in, and the response from our family members and friends was overwhelming. Friends told their friends about our fundraising, and we received contributions from people we didn’t even know! As we neared the marathon and our fundraising goal, we kept updating our site and sent two or three reminder emails, just to make sure no one slipped through the cracks. By the time the marathon rolled around in March, we had surpassed our goal by almost one thousand dollars, and raised a total of $3,400 for Global Water!

Crossing the finish line at the Los Angeles Marathon would have felt like an accomplishment no matter what, but knowing that we had been able to raise so much money in just six weeks to donate to Global Water really made the race phenomenal. And just months after we gave Ted our donations, he sent us photos showing construction underway at one of the schools in the Healthy Schools Program—construction that was partly funded by our marathon bid.

It was an honor to have been able to support Global Water in my father’s name, and know that his legacy lives on in part through the work of such an amazing organization, as well as to work with Ted and know he was supporting us each step of the way!