Everything you need to know.
Women for Women Relay 2024
July 12-13, 2024
Training Starts : April 1, 2024
The Race
Join a relay team of 6-8 women for this amazing 24-hour relay. Relay teams will conquer 6K relay legs from sunrise to sunrise to fund gender-based WASH programs to break the cycles of poverty for women and girls worldwide.
The Need
Holding women and girls back prevents communities and entire countries from breaking the cycle of extreme poverty. The global water crisis affects girls and women the most. In fact, collectively, they spend an estimated 200 million hours hauling water every day—hours they can’t spend getting an education, learning a skill, or earning an income. Girls are hurt by harmful cultural norms and traditions, including female genital mutilation (FGM), forced child marriage, and early pregnancy. Every minute, 22 girls under the age of 18 are married, and this number is rising due to impacts of COVID-19 as families see few options beyond the bride price they can get for their daughters. In emergencies and crises, women and girls in poverty are more vulnerable. Refugee contexts, conflicts, and the current global hunger crisis result in an increase in gender-based violence and child marriages.
The Challenge
From sunrise to sunrise, relay teams of 6-8 women will take on 6k legs with a goal of each participant raising $10,000. We know that raising $10,000 can sound scary but we believe that you can do it. We have specialized fundraising resources and coaches to help make this a reality. $10,000 = clean water for 200 women and girls. Multiply that by 100 team members and we can raise over $1,000,000 and provide water to approximately 20,000 women and girls globally!
A girl growing up in poverty faces greater challenges from the moment she’s born. In the areas where World Vision works, half the health clinics don’t have clean water, putting mother and new baby at risk. A girl’s home might not have accessible water, which means she’ll have to walk — sometimes for hours — to get water that’s most likely dirty, hours she can’t spend going to school or learning a skill. When a girl becomes a woman and wants to provide for herself and her family, she will face more barriers to accessing technology, credit and economic opportunity. World Vision’s Strong Women Strong World® believes that these barriers preventing women and girls from life in all its fullness can be overcome.
A tangible demonstration of this belief is their multi-faceted program approach called Beyond Access. By intentionally designing water, economic empowerment, and microfinance activities to build upon each other, they nurture women’s confidence and skills to address systemic barriers to their participation and agency. It creates a supportive environment that strengthens female participation, creates opportunities for women and girls to learn and use skills, and increases resiliency and growth for generational impact. They work side by side with all community members to foster equitable participation, ownership, and decision making for community transformation. The goal of Beyond Access is for women and girls to know and experience their self-worth, the ability to make their own choices, and the right to influence social change for themselves and others.
Strong Women Strong World Project Summary
The Impact
Clean water is a problem for which there is a solution. World Vision is one of the leading organizations bringing clean/safe water to communities in a sustainable way and provides more clean water than any nongovernmental organization in the world. In it's inaugural year, W4W 2023 raised nearly $700,000, fully funding the implementation of water and sanitation into two health clinics with maternity wards in Ghana, as well as other projects globally. Water changes everything for women. It isn't a solution to poverty, but water is a gateway to health, hope, and opportunity for women that is otherwise absent.
How World Vision Works:
Bringing Water, Sanitation & Hygiene (WASH)
At World Vision we believe that every child deserves clean water. It's the essential building block of life that allows children and their communities to survive and flourish. Our community-based approach gives us deep roots in the community, while our more than 60-year history gives us the longevity and experience to take quality, sustainable interventions to scale.
World Vision has been working in water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) for more than 50 years, starting in the 1960s primarily with small water projects in individual communities. We gained much experience in the subsequent decades, including a significant scale-up through the West Africa Water Initiative – a large public-private partnership, where World Vision served as the lead non-governmental organization. In 2010, World Vision made a strategic decision to scale up its investment in WASH, making an increased, targeted investment in WASH in 12 countries with high WASH need – ten in Africa, one in Latin America, and one in Asia. Because of this strategic investment, over the last 5 years we have reached more that 7 million people with water, sanitation and hygiene, specifically providing safe drinking water to more than 5.5 million people.
The ultimate goal of all of World Vision’s work is child well-being. Child well-being at World Vision is defined by the following four targets:
- Children enjoy good health.
- Children are educated for life.
- Children experience the love of God and their neighbors
- Children are cared for, protected and participating.
World Vision believes that sustainable well-being is impossible without sustainable, equitable access to clean water, dignified sanitation and appropriate hygiene behaviors.
In our clean water work, we strive to provide access to clean water as close as possible to households -- with a maximum of 30 minutes round trip. We build water points in partnership with communities, and we work to ensure that water points are locally managed through water committees. Those committees ensure that water user fees are collected to maintain and repair the well.
World Vision works to provide environmentally sustainable solutions to water access, using solar water pumping technology wherever possible to provide access to clean water using renewable energy sources. We also work to ensure water is kept clean from the source to the point of use, ensuring community members have the knowledge and resources necessary to collect, treat and use their water safety to protect them from drinking contaminated water.
Below are some of the water projects that run in harmony with our other key areas of development: health, education, food, and economic development. This approach tackles the root causes of poverty, enabling children to experience fullness of life.
Training Plans
Click the links below to access our training plans:
Advanced Training Plan | Intermediate Training Plan | Walking Training Plan
Travel
Airports
You can fly into Santa Barbara or any LA Based Airport (then drive or take the train to Santa Barbara). You will not need a car when in Santa Barbara, the city is very walkable or you can grab a Lyft or Uber.
Ground Transport
From any airport: rent a car, Uber/Lyft, carpool
From DTLA or Burbank: Amtrak Pacific Surfliner
From LAX: FlyAway Bus to Grand Central Station, then take Amtrak Pacific Surfliner to Santa Barbara
Airport Shuttles
TWV will offer shuttles to and from Los Angeles (LAX) & Santa Barbara (SBA) airports at the following times. Please book your flights accordingly. *Times are tentative and may change based on volume of flights.
Arrival:
Wednesday from LAX: 9:45 am, 10:45 am, 12:30 pm, 3:45 pm, 5:00 pm
Wednesday from SBA: 11:30 am, 5:30 pm
Thursday from SBA: 12:15 pm, 3:45 pm
Departure:
Sunday to LAX: 8:00 am, 9:30 am, 11:00 am
Sunday to SBA: 8:00 am, 1:00 pm
Event Weekend
Hotel Information:
Hotel Santa Barbara | 533 State St., Santa Barbara, CA 93101
Room block for Team World Vision will be $329/night for any room type.
Tentative Schedule:
Wednesday, July 10th
Travel Day & Check-In
Welcome Reception 5:30 pm
Thursday, July 11th
Team Devo & Shake Out Run
Team Dinner 5:00 pm
Friday, July 12th - RACE DAY!
Race Start 5:45 am
Saturday, July 13th
Race Finish 5:45 am
Post Race Celebration 5:00 pm
Sunday July 14th
Departure Day - Flights home
Optional: Oceanhills Covenant Church
10:00 am service (transportation not provided)
721 E. Cota St., Santa Barbara, CA | www.oceanhills.org
For questions, please reach out to Lyndsey Deane Ratchford.
World Vision P.O. Box 9716 Federal Way, WA 98063
World Vision Inc. is a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.
All donations are tax deductible in full or in part.
89% Programs
8% Fundraising + 3% Management
In 2023, 89% of World Vision’s total operating expenses were used for programs that benefit children, families, and communities in need.
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