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Wimbledon Half Marathon smashes targets!

Young Citizens successfully organises its first fundraising charity challenge

On Sunday 13th October, Young Citizens participated in its inaugural charity run. Eleven runners braved a grey and rainy October morning to complete the 13.1mile course around Wimbledon Common. Navigating the waterlogged course which contained treacherous mud sections, hazardous puddles and high-fiving Wombles all our team made it home to rapturous applause.

The motivation for fielding a team was to support our fundraising efforts during our 30th anniversary year. In 1989, Young Citizens (then known as Citizenship Foundation) was formed to support a fairer and more inclusive society through young people’s entitlement to citizenship education. Three decades later, the need is as great as ever. As such we have challenged ourselves and our friends to raise £30,000 this year to help us take our work to more deprived communities and social mobility cold spots. Every penny raised will be spent on helping young people become confident, active citizens who contribute to their communities.

While some of our runners had completed longer runs before, others had decided to take on the challenge as their first serious running experience. We are incredibly proud of all our Young Citizens runners for achieving very respectable finishing times, but also in raising an astonishing £5,307 in aid of our appeal!

“Having completed a few marathons, I wasn’t expecting today to be as tough as it was! The course and the weather made it really hard work, but it was all worth it knowing the donations were going to a very special charity.” – Mike Burroughs

Although these runners have completed their bit – this is just the beginning for us! With this positive experience under our belt we are now planning our next event, which will be the London Landmarks Half Marathon in March 2020. All of our charity’s places for this run are currently filled, but if you are interested in running for us (either at this event or a future event) then please sign-up to our waiting list at the bottom of the page.

A final thank you

We want to take this opportunity to acknowledge each of our committed fundraisers. We are extremely grateful for you helping to raise awareness and valuable funds to benefit even more young people. Without supporters like you, we couldn’t continue to change the lives of young people through our work.

Thank you Mike, James and Dan (from The Train Station), Sam, George, Edge, Thomas, Naomi, Ruth, Rachel and Paul. We could not have wished for a better team to kickstart our fundraising charity challenges!

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