Member-only story
Any time you set out on a journey, it isn’t a bad idea to check in with your heroes. One of my biggest heroes is a badass by the name of Anne Mahlum.
Anne is a kind of crazy mixture of compassion, drive, and an uncompromising commitment to excellence. She first came to prominence by starting a non-profit organization called Back on My Feet. The organization came into being after Anne had landed a dream job in Philadelphia. She is a runner, so she’d start her day by running the city streets. Her path took her past a halfway house, people transitioning out of homelessness. She’d wave to them and chat with them, and developed a rapport with them.
One day, after she’d said hi, she took off down the road to continue her workout. Then she stopped (this is where the compassion kicked in). She wondered: why am I the runner and they’re not? They’re just as capable of being runners as I am. She turned around and went back.
It turns out that running with people who are transitioning out of homelessness and incarceration is a great way to help them heal and to reintroduce them to society. Today, the organization has grown to 12 cities and dozens of teams. I’ve been volunteering with Team Uptown in NYC for the last 4 years, and I can tell you that I get more out of it than I put in. When I was going through the 10-week process of finding out what kind of cancer I had (before learning that it was stage 4 lymphoma), I turned to my Back on My Feet team for support. Our team members (who are…