By Paul N. Bloom
Girls on the Run International oversees an educational program that puts pre-teen girls through a 12-week curriculum that uses running-related activities to teach self-respect and healthy living habits. From its start in 1996 as a small, after-school activity with 13 girls from Charlotte, North Carolina, Girls on the Run grew to deliver its program to over 40,000 girls per year by 2006, connecting to them through over 140 affiliates (or councils) that operate at hundreds of sites throughout the United States and Canada. The program has received numerous awards and recognitions, and evaluations of its efforts have indicated that graduates of the program have improved their self-esteem and formed more positive attitudes about healthy eating and physical activity. The case describes the mix of strategies that Girls on the Run International employed to scale to where it was in 2006, while also identifying the challenges the organization faced in trying to scale further. Particular attention is paid to the ecosystem in which the organization operated, identifying the different players and forces in that system that must be leveraged and accommodated for successful scaling of the organization’s social impact to occur.
CASE , the Fuqua School of Business (CASE SE-04), 2007