Why I'm Running for Magic Bus
What got me was how much it mirrored something I already care about. Magic Bus runs on a simple idea: give a kid a team, and you give them a reason to believe in themselves more. I've seen that firsthand. Back in 2015, some friends and I started Ball 4 a Cure, a nonprofit that began as a pickup basketball tournament and turned into a fund at Connecticut Children's Hospital, helping kids in cancer treatment have a stable home to come back to.
Magic Bus started in 1999, when a former rugby coach in Mumbai noticed a group of boys from a nearby slum watching his team practice and waved them over. What began as pickup games turned into regular training, and the change in those kids was almost immediate. They went back to school, picked up vocational courses, and started mentoring younger kids in their neighborhoods, just from being part of a team.
That's the whole engine behind Magic Bus: not charity in the handout sense, but sport as a reason to show up and start seeing yourself differently. It's grown from a few dozen kids in Mumbai to over 375,000 across India today, still built on that same idea.
Because real change isn't measured by the size of a donation. It's measured by the difference it makes:
- $25 supports a full year of programming for one child
- 120% growth in family income for participating youth
Hoping to finish this marathon better than the first one/only other one I ran (see image below)
