Run Across Ethiopia

In January 2011, a team of American and Ethiopian runners set out from Addis Ababa, dropped into the Great Rift Valley, and climbed back into the highlands, finishing in the Yirgacheffe coffee region. They covered ten marathons in ten days, roughly 400 kilometers, running alongside farmers, students, and teachers from the communities the campaign was built to support.

The run was designed around a simple principle that still governs On the Ground's work: the communities decide what gets built. In the Yirgacheffe region, farmers at the fair trade cooperative of Negele Gorbitu, in the town of Afursa Waro, had already used premiums from their fair trade and organic coffee to build a health clinic and a primary school. The Run Across Ethiopia extended that work to more coffee-growing communities, in partnership with the Tesfa Foundation and the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union, a union of 129 fair trade cooperatives representing some 800,000 families.

Education was the focus because the need was overwhelming. At the time of the run, little more than half of the region's children completed primary school, adult literacy stood at 36 percent, and life expectancy was 53 years. Classrooms were the single request that came back from community after community.

The run was also a storytelling platform. Musicians, filmmakers, and journalists travelled with the team. Seth & May, of Michigan's Earthwork Music collective, joined as On the Ground's first Musical Ambassadors, collaborating with Ethiopian jazz musicians and performing in local schools; they later released the two-part album New Flower, with proceeds supporting the work.

The result outran the goal. The campaign raised more than $200,000 against a $175,000 target — enough to build schools with gendered latrines and a library in the Hase Gola communities. Those schools serve more than 1,500 students a year and are all still operating today, and donors who first heard about On the Ground through the run later funded a fourth school.