Last Sunday, NYU track and field and cross country athletes launched a new chapter of Run Your City in Greenwich Village. The six-week program, hosted next to the Williamsburg Bridge in East River Park, brings free running sessions and community building to kids in Lower Manhattan. For the first day, around 30 kids showed up to the event coached by eight NYU athletes.
“As NCAA teams, we have a responsibility to be volunteering and impacting our community positively,” co-president and CAS senior Cindy Leonard said. “I think that we hadn’t been doing that consistently, and Run Your City seemed like a great opportunity for us to give back.”
Leonard, a sprinter on the track and field team, said the sport wasn’t accessible to her until her teenage years, and she wanted to give back to kids in New York City by introducing them to track at an earlier age. She first heard about the Run Your City organization, which stretches nationwide, from a chapter organized by athletes at Columbia University, and was inspired to create her own. After gathering a leadership team of NYU track and cross country athletes, the Greenwich Village chapter was approved in the spring of 2025.
Going into day one, the organization’s first priority was teamwork. It was important to Leonard that the chapter’s leadership consisted of a diverse set of athletes. She especially hoped to bridge the gap between track and cross country athletes, who don’t have the opportunity to practice together because of their alternate seasons.
“Our delegation was very much a conversation about what people’s strengths were,” Leonard said. “Knowing that we were starting this from scratch, we took a very collaborative approach, trusting that we’d all help each other out.”
Senior sprinter Beverly Okyere, who shares co-presidency with Leonard, led the chapter’s outreach. She spent several weeks over the summer putting up posters, contacting parents and reaching out to local schools to raise awareness about the sessions.
“We wanted to make sure that our program was visible to people in our community,” Okyere said. “Not just in Greenwich Village, but also in the surrounding areas. We wanted to have a good groundwork for the children who are going to be joining us.”
Okyere consulted with schools and churches in Greenwich Village to find a location and time that worked to give as many families as possible the opportunity to join. The team also wanted to put safety at the forefront of the event, and looked to advice from parent coordinators.
“Parents are obviously very concerned for their kids,” Leonard said. “They want the best for them, as do we, and I think we found common ground on that.”
The first session was built around teamwork, the “value of the day,” according to Okyere. The kids ran around East River Park playing freeze tag and sharks and minnows. The athletes emphasized the importance of proper warm-ups and cool-downs to keep bodies healthy after intense exercise.
“I think it’s so important in the city,” Jillian Porter, an NYU faculty member whose child participated in the session, said. “Our kids don’t have big, open spaces to run around, and it’s loud and it’s noisy and it’s chaotic, and it’s really great for them to be able to get to a park and play with other kids in a fun way that’s also active and really healthy.”
In the long term, the chapter’s leadership hopes to promote health and safety for the kids of New York City. Okyere hopes to connect collegiate athletes with local families to ensure that every child has access to sports and gains a good background on what it means to move their bodies in a healthy and safe way.
“We want to make sure that we’re not just another run club, but a place where kids can really learn something about themselves,” Okyere said.
Contact Kiran Komanduri at [email protected]
