Liberty Run started with a simple idea: a marathon is already 26.2 miles of effort, so let it carry something. Every runner who registers is attached to a cause, and every mile they log pulls funding toward it.You do not need to be fast, and you do not need to be a fundraiser. Choose a distance you can finish, choose an organization whose work you believe in, and share your page. Friends give because they know you, and the money goes straight to the group you picked. Nothing is pooled, nothing is skimmed, and nothing waits until race day to reach them.Last year that turned a few thousand pairs of running shoes into a year of operating costs for organizations that spend most of the year quietly short of it. This year the field is bigger.<hr style="text-align: left;"> WHY IT MATTERS?Most of the organizations on this page work on budgets that would not cover a mid-size company's software bill. A morning like this one moves the needle in a way a single donor rarely can, because it brings in hundreds of small gifts from people who were never on a mailing list. That is the point. Liberty Run is not asking you to give more. It is asking you to ask.<hr> HOW IT WORKS:<ol dir="ltr"><li style="text-align: left; font-size: 18px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Choose your distance. Full, half, 10K, or the 5K walk. Every distance raises the same way, so pick the one you will actually finish.</li><li style="text-align: left; font-size: 18px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Choose your cause. Browse the organizations running with us and join the one whose work you want to fund. Your fundraising page is created the moment you register.</li><li style="text-align: left; font-size: 18px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Share and run. Send your page to the people who already show up for you. Then show up on October 5 and go collect the miles.</li></ol><hr style="text-align: left;"> DISTANCES:<ul><li dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;">Full Marathon, 26.2 mi: The whole thing. Flat, quick, and finished before the heat arrives. Fundraising minimum $500.</li><li dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;">Half Marathon, 13.1 mi: The most popular way to run Liberty. Same course, same crowds, home by mid-morning. Minimum $250.</li><li dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;">10K, 6.2 mi:&nbsp;Far enough to be a real morning, short enough to train for in eight weeks. Minimum $150.</li><li dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;">5K Community Walk: Strollers, dogs, grandparents, first-timers. No minimum, no pressure, no clock.</li></ul><hr style="text-align: left;"> RACE DAY ESSENTIALS<ul><li dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;">Packet pickup: Friday and Saturday, October 3 and 4, 10:00 AM to 7:00 PM, Sacramento Convention Center. Photo ID required.</li><li dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;">Gear check: Opens 5:30 AM at the start, closes 2:00 PM at the finish.</li><li dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;">Aid stations: Every 1.5 miles on the full and half, with water, electrolyte and medical support at each.</li><li dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;">Spectators: Best viewing at miles 6, 13 and 24. Bring a sign, they carry further than you think.</li><li dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;">Accessibility: The full course is wheelchair and handcycle accessible. Push-assist teams welcome in every distance.</li></ul>

Quick Links

Liberty Run 2026

Team Crowdera

Ask a teacher where a child falls behind and almost none of them will say the classroom. They will say the hours after it.Between the last bell and a parent getting home from a shift, there is a gap of three or four hours. Kids who have someone in that gap, a tutor, a homework club, a patient adult with a pencil, arrive the next morning ready. Kids who do not arrive a little further back than they were the day before, and the gap compounds quietly until somebody calls it a learning problem.Joyful Minds USA runs the room that fills those hours. Small groups, the same faces every week, a volunteer who knows which chapter you got stuck on last Tuesday. It is not glamorous work and it does not photograph like a crisis. It is just a table, a snack, and someone who expects you to show up.What it is not is free. A seat costs about $340 for a school year once you count the space, the materials and the coordinator who keeps forty volunteers turning up on the right nights. Right now there are more children on the waiting list than in the room.Impact tiers:<ul dir="ltr"><li style="font-size: 18px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">$35: a week of after-school seats for one child</li><li style="font-size: 18px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">$85: books and materials for a full group for a term</li><li style="font-size: 18px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">$340: one child's seat for the entire school year</li><li style="font-size: 18px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">$1,700: keeps a five-child small group running all year</li></ul>

The Hours After Three O'Clock

There is a particular kind of arithmetic that happens in a parked car outside a grocery store. Rent went up in March. Hours got cut in June. The list in your hand is already the short version, and you are deciding which line to take off it.The Giving Happiness Foundation exists so that fewer people have to do that math. Fresh produce, staples, and hot meals, distributed without a means test, an interview, or a form that asks you to explain yourself. You show up, you take what you need, you go home and make dinner. That is the whole process, and the lack of process is deliberate. Dignity is not a nice extra here. It is the reason people come back before things get desperate rather than after.The organisation moves roughly a ton of food a week on a budget that would not cover a mid-size company's catering. Most of it comes from rescued surplus, which is cheap to obtain and expensive to move: the cost is refrigeration, fuel, and the volunteer coordinator who makes sure a pallet of perishables reaches a family the same week rather than a landfill.Every dollar raised at Liberty Run goes to that middle part, the unglamorous logistics that turn donated food into food someone actually eats.Impact tiers:<ul dir="ltr"><li style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 18px;">$25: a week of groceries for one person</li><li style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 18px;">$60: a family of four fed for a week</li><li style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 18px;">$150: fuel and cold storage for one distribution run</li><li style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 18px;">$600: a full mobile pantry stop, roughly 120 households</li></ul>Twenty-six miles is a long way to go hungry. So is a Tuesday.

Nobody Should Do the Math

Nobody drops out in a single moment. It happens in increments. A parent gets sick, so you take a few shifts. The shifts get longer. You miss a week, then a unit, then a semester, and by the time anyone notices you are officially a worker and unofficially a sixteen-year-old who cannot come back because coming back means walking into a room where everyone is a year ahead of you.Peace Trust works with young people at exactly that point. Not with a scholarship application and a wish of good luck, but with the actual obstacles: a bridging tutor who closes the gap you fell into, a caseworker who negotiates with the employer and the school district, and a small monthly stipend that replaces enough of the lost wage that a family can afford to let their child be a child again.That last part is the piece most programmes skip, and it is the piece that decides whether any of the rest works. You cannot tutor a teenager out of a household that needs their paycheck.The programme costs about $2,100 per young person per year and returns roughly four out of five of them to a diploma track. Twelve are enrolled. The referral list has thirty-one names on it.Impact tiers:<ul dir="ltr"><li style="font-size: 18px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">$50: one week of bridging tuition</li><li style="font-size: 18px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">$175: one month of a family's wage-replacement stipend</li><li style="font-size: 18px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">$525: a full quarter of support for one student</li><li style="font-size: 18px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">$2,100: one young person, one year, all the way through</li></ul>Run so somebody else gets to finish.

The Kids Who Clocked In Instead

Rural water does not fail dramatically. There is no burst main and no news crew. A well casing cracks, a pump ages out, a tiny district discovers that the repair costs more than its entire annual budget, and then the town lives with bottled water and a boil notice that quietly becomes permanent.It happens in more American communities than most people would guess, and it stays happening because the sums involved are too small to attract federal attention and too large for two hundred households to absorb.Vest in Villages works at that awkward scale. Well rehabilitation, pump replacement, filtration for households on failing private wells, and, just as importantly, training somebody local to maintain the thing afterwards so the fix outlasts the grant. The organisation also does the unglamorous half of rural viability: small equipment loans and market access for the growers and makers who keep these places economically alive, because a town with clean water and no work empties out anyway.Nothing here is complicated engineering. It is a pump, a filter, a length of pipe, and somebody who came back to do the job. The only missing ingredient is the money.Impact tiers:<ul dir="ltr"><li style="font-size: 18px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">$45: a household water test and filter cartridges for six months</li><li style="font-size: 18px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">$220: whole-house filtration for one family on a failing well</li><li style="font-size: 18px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">$900: a replacement pump for a shared community well</li><li style="font-size: 18px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">$4,500: full rehabilitation of one community well, serving 40 to 60 households</li></ul>Every mile you run, somebody turns on a tap that works.

Liberty Run 2026

Collab Details

Collab Statistics

Our Partner Organizations

RNPO Collabs

The Hours After Three O'Clock

Nobody Should Do the Math

The Kids Who Clocked In Instead

About Liberty Run 2026