Running 4 Refugees: "May My Swiftness be Their Swiftness"

Every £1 Donation will go straight to one of these three charities,

who will receive 1/3 of the overall donations from this fundraiser.

Each £1 Donation = 1km.

I will run 1km for every £1 Donation, with plans to run 1000km in total. This will not be achieved in a single run, but regular short runs every week of around 7-8km at a time.

Recommended larger donation for anyone feeling generous: £22 - 22 is my lucky number, and also the shortest distance required to cross the English Channel in Miles.

GoFundMe does not enable me to put all three charities as beneficiaries, so I have set up this fundraiser to distribute the funds equally between them myself. I aim to be completely transparent about this process from start to finish. Each charity has a donate option on their website, and so you are also welcome to donate directly to them too & inform me so I can add the sum of the donation to my running goal.

My name is Phoenix, and I have been running casually for a few years now.

I'm not the fastest runner, but I keep going and I don't give up easily.

Over the past few years I have noticed the state of our refugee crisis and every bit of anti-refugee and anti-migrant hatred left a horribly bitter taste in my mouth, but never quite knew what I could do to help the situation. It's easy to get overwhelmed with the size of the issue and forget the small things we do every day. Like running - challenging yourself to run further, faster. And that made me think of another kind of travel - the kind of journey you don't go on by choice. As a transgender person, in the current state of politics, I have had to ask myself more than once if I know what I'll do if I ever have to flee the country. It's a fact of life for some communities to be planning for that sort of disaster, and one which has all of my compassion. In the US right now, members of my own transgender community have had to flee their state & even the country in recent years; it brings me closer to the issue, to have a personal connection to it, but even long before I knew I was trans, this issue was important to me.

As an autistic person with hyperempathy, I will regularly break down in tears over the suffering of other people, especially large scale events like this. I swing constantly between overwhelm and compassion fatigue. It is my hope that this will be a more productive use of my empathy - so that someone in need might actually benefit from it.

For religious reasons, I consider kindness and generosity to travellers, visitors, migrants, and foreigners to be of the utmost importance. I noticed that after a good run, I often found myself making a donation to a charitable fund for refugees afterwards. "What if I open this up to other people? They could donate too, if they wanted, and we could build this into something bigger," I thought to myself, and so this idea was born.

I have set myself a target to raise £1000 and run 1000km to complete this challenge. Based on how far I run in a week right now, I estimate this will take me until Spring 2026 to complete. Further donations will of course challenge me to run further even after the £1000 goal is reached, so it could be well into 2026 or even 2027 but I will honour every £1 donation and look forward to the challenge.

I will be documenting my progress on:

Instagram: @phoenixmorrisboard

TikTok: @aburntphoenix

May my swiftness be their swiftness.