By the time Girls on the Run of Los Angeles County began its next chapter, the foundation was solid. A community had gathered, written their names on a flip chart, and built something from the ground up. Now the work of growing it fell to a new generation of leaders.

A Breath of Fresh Air

Noemy Ponce Johnson had spent years working in youth mental health after earning her master's degree in social work at UCLA. The work was meaningful, but the weight of it was hard to carry. She wanted to help people and still be able to leave work at the end of the day. When a colleague's connection to a non-profit event, featuring Girls on the Run International's Molly Barker, led her to Girls on the Run, it sparked something. 

"It was a breath of fresh air — knowing you were making a difference in something so tangible," Noemy reflects. "There was so much joy in it."

What began as volunteering with the Pasadena council eventually became a full-time role supporting a period of rapid expansion. Sites were opening across Los Angeles County — from Long Beach to the San Gabriel Foothills — and the most persistent challenge was often finding enough coaches for every girl who signed up. The operating budget at the time was less than $100,000, but the ambition was considerably larger.

"We had a mindset that no girl was going to be turned away," Noemy says. "Things just get done because we can't let these girls down.

Building a Program That Reflected the Community

As the council grew, its leaders worked deliberately to ensure the program reflected the girls and families it served. Flyers went out in English and Spanish, and outreach was bilingual by design. When the curriculum felt like it needed to be more inclusive and more reflective of the communities the council was working in, staff pushed national for approval to make changes. 

"Social justice, diversity, equity, access — it wasn't separate from the work," Noemy says. "It was how we built everything."

During site visits, watching girls interact, seeing them at the 5K, hearing them talk to each other, watching coaches show up for them week after week — Noemy felt it constantly. "It just warmed my heart," she says. "We had people who really cared that the girls had the best experience."

Laurel Fowler, whose background is in public health, carried the same commitment into the boardroom. The harder decisions — maintaining financial aid, vetting partnerships, weighing growth against the council's identity — were questions of values as much as operations.

"Access was foundational," Laurel says. "And so was values alignment. We never wanted growth at the expense of who we were."

Lauren Rauscher, a sociologist by training, helped build the council's early evaluation framework: pre- and post-program data that tracked what a 12-week session actually did for the girls in it. The data mattered for funders, but it also mattered internally.

"It helped us say, here's what we know, and here's what we're seeing," she recalls.

Professionalizing Without Losing the Thread

Bringing on Molly Snow as the first full-time executive director marked another significant shift. The organization was growing in ways that required dedicated leadership, clearer systems, stronger infrastructure, and a more sustainable model. At the same time, the question the founding board had wrestled with from the beginning — how do you build something larger without losing what made it work — remained at the center of every decision.

The Women Who Kept Building

The council's second decade was shaped by women who came as coaches, staff, and board members and found themselves changed by what they'd helped build.

For Jen Johnston, who moved through roles as coach, volunteer, and eventually staff, the transformation was personal: "I've been lucky enough to build lifelong friendships along the way — people who have truly shaped me. Being part of girls discovering their confidence and strength changed me just as much as it changed them."

That sense of belonging runs through nearly every story from this era. For Ali Magistrali, whose experience spanned New York City and Los Angeles, it was simple: "GOTR to me means acceptance and inclusion."

Board member Erin Goldman describes the program as "bridging the gap between potential and power," and recalls the particular joy of watching strategic plans come alive at the 5K — the moment when months of behind-the-scenes work became a finish line full of girls.

Then came COVID. The finish lines disappeared. For board member Molly Fast, those years stand out not as a gap in the organization's story, but as some of its most defining. "It was so meaningful to figure out ways to build and sustain community," she says, "knowing how important this program is to so many girls and families.

That the council held together — and held its community together — through those years says something about what two decades of relationship-building had made possible. The values the founding board had insisted on, the infrastructure Noemy, and then Molly, and their colleagues had built, the culture of showing up that had defined the organization from its earliest days — all of it proved more durable than a pandemic.

It's what continues to drive the organization's growth today, and what carried Girls on the Run LA into its twentieth year still asking the same question: how do we do this for more girls?