Establishing a Lifesaving Habit of Walking - GirlTrek [Podcast Series]

• [:55] Dr. Bantham introduces her guest, T. Morgan Dixon

  • Morgan is the Co-Founder and CEO of GirlTrek.  

  • Morgan also has a background working as a teacher in public schools.

• [1:24] GirlTrek pledge

  • “And every single one of those members has committed to opening her front door, stepping out on faith, in hope in a time that feels hopeless in the direction of our healthiest, most fulfilled life. What that looks like practically is that we pledge to walk 30 minutes a day, five days a week to establish a life saving habit of walking.”

• [2:35] Walking as an accessible, affordable intervention

  • “It's a really powerful intervention physically and mentally, to improve mental health and physical health. It's also accessible to everyone around the world, right? It's affordable to everyone around the world. And there are all of these kinds of, this kind of cascade of benefits that happens once you get a critical mass of women walking in neighborhoods, often the highest need neighborhoods in the country.”

• [4:35] 30 minutes of self-care

  • “And so this notion that you don't have time to work out is very real. It's very real. And so asking women to pledge 30 minutes to care for themselves. Just 30 minutes. It's hard to say no to that. It's hard to say no to that. When you frame it in that way. Of your 24 hours, you can work 23 and a half hours for someone else. If you can just work a half hour for yourself, everything can change.”

• [8:20] Self-care as survival

  • “And that, those are strong words.  But we understand that when we are losing our family members at 30 years old, 40 years old, 50 years old, from preventable diseases, that self-care is survival.  It's survival.”

• [10:18] A health revolution

  • “We are a million deep into the revolution. And, you know, there are roughly 17 million women of the age we target, mothering age, in America. And we have one of the 17 in our movement. And so when we talk about change, what change are we seeking? Certainly cultural change, which I believe that GirlTrek is either in the lexicon of half of black women in America, but we need it to be in the lexicon, take a walk, you know, join a movement, walk outside 30 minutes a day to save your own life.”

• [13:40] Revolution success

  • “We want to live. We want the fire in us to just, to have air to breathe.  We want to live. So that's when, that’s when we know the revolution is over.  And then the way we measure living is through life expectancy. And so our next horizon is to increase the life expectancy of black women worldwide by 10 years in 10 years.”

• [17:31] Change agents

  • “I'm not suggesting you do it alone. Because one of the things we learn from the past is that this notion of like the solo change agent, this hero is such a fallacy. It's such a fallacy.  It's not true that you can even do it alone. So my recommendation is to make the edges of yourself porous. So get away from I and ego, really lose yourself in justice work, in change work, in love work, and go in the direction that lights you up the most. And I guarantee that you're going to land on something that changes the world.”

• [21:58] Heroes and everyday women

  • “We know Harriet Tubman. And her story resonates so deeply with us that we believe certainly she's a hero, and so are we. And that everyday, we choose to hope, that hope in the midst of everything we know to be true in America, that that in and of itself is a Tubman-esque effort.”

• [23:15] Superhero blue and visibility

  • “That tiny little example happens thousands of times, I'm guessing, every day in America and we want it to happen thousands more where we can see kind of a sister who has a lifeline there who has shared values, who's made a commitment of the same pledge that we have to take 30 minutes a day for ourselves.”

• [25:32] A tapestry of activism

  • “And, you know, these things in isolation are small, but once we band together with all of our movements and networks and hopes and dreams, it really is catalytic.”

• [27:10] Hope

  • “I just, I continue to think about what it took to get to this moment, what it took for me to get to this moment and it fills me with gratitude, every single day.  And it beckons me to act.  Like, I am invited through that gratitude to act every single day, to act, to act, to act. So I do that. I do that, sometimes I get tired.  But mostly I'm charged from the inside.”