ABOUT · OUR STORY
It started with an ultra marathon.
In 2011, a group of international runners traveled to Kenya for a 50-mile race in the bush. Within months, they had become a girls' education organization. Fifteen years later, AMGP supports a generation of Maasai women on their way to becoming community leaders. Here's how that happened.
2010 · THE TRIP
The race that started it all.
The Amazing Maasai Marathon began as a small, beautiful idea: bring runners from across the world to Kenya for a destination race in Maasai country, raise some money for the local community, build relationships across two cultures that almost never meet. The first race was in 2011. The runners who came back that year were changed by what they saw — and especially by what they didn't see.
What they didn't see was Maasai girls in school past primary. By the time a Maasai girl turns 12, her formal education almost always ends. By the time she turns 15, she is often "reserved" as a bride. That isn't a hidden statistic; it is the visible reality of the communities the runners were running through.
The founders — Sarah and Molly — could not unsee it. They came home and started raising money for scholarships. Within a few short months, the Amazing Maasai Girls Project was a registered 501(c)(3).
They didn't set out to start an education organization. The race introduced them to the community, but the girls are what made them stay.
2011 — 2025 · CHAPTER ONE
Fifteen years of quiet, careful work.
For fifteen years, AMGP did one thing well: keep Maasai girls in secondary school. Full tuition, room, board, uniforms, books, three years of boarding school at St. Francis. We never grew fast. We never tried to. We supported the cohorts we could fund completely, and we followed every girl through to graduation.
We invested deeply over time. 201 lifetime students. 139 secondary school graduates. A 96% retention rate that holds across every cohort. $706,000 in reserves, professionally managed. A sustainable model.
We didn't grow fast. We never tried to. We just supported every girl all the way through, every year, for fifteen years."
— MOLLY FITZPATRICK, CO-FOUNDER
The marathon kept happening, year after year.
The Global Run, our virtual fundraiser, accumulated fifteen years of community.
The running club at the Kenyan schools continued, even after marathons paused.
Running stayed part of who we are. But the heart of the AMGP is our scholarships, the school visits, the careful follow-through on every commitment.
2025 — ONWARD · CHAPTER TWO
The shift to leadership.
By 2024, we had to be honest with ourselves about something we had been quietly noticing for years. Our graduates were going home to villages where almost nothing had changed. A new diploma in a community where most girls still didn't finish primary school. We were producing exceptional individuals — but not yet community change at scale.
So in 2025 we made the biggest strategic shift in AMGP's history. Every secondary school graduate would now receive a full university scholarship. And every university student would join a new program called the Changemaker Capstone: a four-year leadership track in which she designs and runs her own community impact project, as a condition of her scholarship.
We hired AMGP Alumnae to work as Post-Secondary Program Coordinators. We hired Joan, a Kenyan educator, to lead the Capstone. We tightened our focus, deepened our investment.
Today, AMGP is no longer a scholarship program. It's a leadership pipeline. Every Maasai girl who joins us gets seven years: three in secondary school, four in university, all of them in a leadership program that ends with her standing in front of her community as a woman who has earned the right to lead it.
