On a sunny morning in May, Courtney Berg, MSW ’05, scans the streets of downtown St. Louis, bustling with close to 10,000 grown-ups and girls in green and teal T-shirts. As executive director of Girls on the Run (GOTR), Berg has been working toward this race day, a 3.1-mile run undertaken by thousands of metro-area girls who have completed the organization’s 10-week training program. It’s the largest timed 5k in St. Louis.
Berg has been here since 4 a.m., taking care of race-day details. “Things build slowly,” she says. “The DJ starts playing music, more and more families come, and suddenly I turn around and there are nearly 4,000 girls having a dance party on Market Street.”
Held each spring and fall, the race is the culminating event for the GOTR girls. For the preceding three months, the third- through eighth-graders have met twice weekly with volunteer coaches to complete the GOTR curriculum, which combines training for a 5k run with lessons that inspire girls to become independent thinkers, enhance their problem-solving skills and make healthy decisions. For example, in the lesson “Valuing What’s Important,” coaches guide the girls in a conversation about character, inner beauty and standing up for one’s values.
Berg has completed a dozen marathons, but it was the water, not the racetrack, that first drew her into sports. “I took my first steps on a dock,” she says. As a girl in St. Louis, she swam breaststoke events and the 500 freestyle. But by the time she got to college in Michigan, she found it hard to make it to the pool. Instead, she began running with friends.
“Running made me feel so capable,” she says. “When you silence the noise around you, you can hear the voice within.”
After graduation, she took her running shoes to East San Jose, California, where she joined Teach For America at one of the largest high schools west of the Mississippi. Working with kids who had significant learning, physical and cognitive differences, she created a program that grouped students and teachers into “families” and approached their topics thematically.
“Running needed to be part of my self-care,” Berg says. “It allowed me to be more present for my students.”
When she returned to St. Louis for graduate studies at the Brown School, she signed up as a volunteer coach with Girls on the Run at St. Gabriel the Archangel School in South St. Louis. Berg immediately felt a connection to the program’s potential as a therapeutic intervention. “Every week, the girls came ready to talk; they had amazing insights,” she says. “When we can equip girls early on, their self-esteem improves. They make a commitment to healthy living.”
After earning an MSW, Berg spent five years as director of Catholic Charities Southside Center. In 2011, she was drawn back to Girls on the Run, this time as its executive director.
The St. Louis council of Girls on the Run has seen explosive growth since its founding, from about 20 girls in 2002 to 7,000 today. “We’ve never approached a school,” Berg says. “The initiative always comes from a school, the parents, the counselors.” She credits this grassroots approach as one of the reasons for the program’s high site retention.
Berg is often asked whether there is a “Boys on the Run” on the horizon. “There’s a need for this program for girls,” she says. Besides, boys benefit from the program, if indirectly. As the mother of two sons, she says, “These are the women I want them to be surrounded by.”
Thinking back to race day, Berg has to catch her breath, as it sinks in that there are this many girls — and their families and their coaches — who believe that the finish line is just the start. “As I run alongside the girls,” she says, “I wonder, ‘What if we did this more?’”