Twenty years ago, Girls on the Run of Los Angeles County — then Girls on the Run of Pasadena and the San Gabriel Valley — was a small, volunteer-led effort with a handful of program sites, an active board, and a few deeply committed leaders holding the work together. By early 2007, the council had reached an inflection point.
To figure out what came next, a core group convened a weekend community meeting. Parents, coaches, volunteers, and supporters gathered to consider what was possible: an independent council, an affiliate structure, or even the possibility of closing entirely. They talked about what the program meant to the girls it served, what it would take to sustain it, and whether this community had the will to try.
At the end of the conversation, a flip chart was placed at the front of the room with an invitation: if you'd like to help take this into the next phase, write your name next to something you'd be willing to do.
One by one, people stepped forward.
"That flip chart became our next wave of volunteers and early fundraising," recalls founding board member Elizabeth Sadlon. "The community decided together that this was something worth building."
They still refer to it as the name tag meeting.
A Working Board, In Every Sense
Lauren Rauscher had first discovered Girls on the Run while in graduate school in Atlanta, where she coached a team and immediately connected with the mission. After moving to Long Beach, she drove to Pasadena just to stay involved. When the name tag meeting sparked a new wave of volunteers, Lauren was one of them.
"We basically said, let's give it a whirl," she remembers. "And we did."
What followed was a grassroots working-board culture. Most members held full-time jobs and still met in the early mornings, divided responsibilities, coached teams, wrote grants, and did whatever else needed doing.
"It really became everyone's part-time job," Lauren says. "I still don't know how we did it."
Laurel Fowler came in around the same time, looking for a way to volunteer. A mutual friend encouraged her to coach a team at Victory Park in spring 2009. "I loved everything about it," Laurel recalls. "The program, the volunteers, the girls. It was impossible not to want to do more."
She would go on to serve as grants committee chair, board secretary, and eventually board chair — a trajectory that started with showing up and saying yes.
What They Refused to Compromise
As the council grew, so did the decisions that tested its values.
During an early strategic planning session, the board worked through a vision statement for the organization. For Laurel, it came down to something she still remembers: "We are helping today's joyful, happy girls become tomorrow's strong, confident women." Empowerment, movement, character, healthy choices — and something larger, too. The understanding that when a girl is shaped by Girls on the Run, it doesn't stop with her. It extends to her family, her community, and the girls who come after her.
Sponsors approached the organization whose products didn't align with what they were teaching girls about healthy choices. The board had to grapple with the question: will we take money just because it's money? The answer, consistently, was no.
"Access was foundational," Laurel says. "And so was values alignment. We never wanted growth at the expense of who we were."
That meant staying committed to offering the program in the places where girls were least likely to have access to it, protecting financial aid even when resources were tight, and building reserves so that access wouldn't be the first thing sacrificed in a difficult year.
The early board members built a set of values and commitments that were embedded in the Los Angeles council and sturdy enough to outlast any single season, or any single board.
What came next was the work of bringing those commitments to life at scale.
