Newton Running Receives Trickle Up’s Leet Humanitarian Award

CEO Jerry Lee accepted award at Trickle Up annual gala on April 4

APRIL 9, 2012 (Boulder, Co)— Newton Running, the leader in natural form running, was awarded the 2012 Glen and Mildred Robbins Leet Humanitarian Award from Trickle Up, a New York-based, non-governmental organization dedicated to alleviating poverty. Since 2008, Newton Running has made financial contributions to Trickle Up, which provides conditional seed capital and business training to the world’s lowest-earning people so that they may start a micro-enterprise.

“We believe strongly in what they do to help the impoverished become financially independent and give women and their children a chance at a better life,” says Newton Running CEO Jerry Lee.

Trickle Up’s mission resonates personally with Lee, a self-made entrepreneur who grew up in a low-income Illinois household with 14 brothers and sisters, then moved to Boulder, Colorado, to become a highly successful real estate investor and later co-founded Newton Running with Danny Abshire in 2007.

Lee accepted the award on behalf of Newton Running at the annual Trickle Up gala in New York City on April 4. The Glen and Mildred Robbins Leet Humanitarian Award, named after the Trickle Up’s founders, is given to supporters who demonstrate a passionate commitment to the organization’s core mission of eradicating extreme poverty. Past award recipients include Wendy Gordon Rockefeller (2010), a leader in the green consumer movement, and Charles Slaughter, founder of TravelSmith and Living Goods (2009).

Newton Running’s  Director of Social Responsibility (and Jerry’s daughter), Wendy Lee, witnessed first hand the impact of Trickle Up’s investment in small businesses when she and her mother, Donna Lee, visited several war-affected Guatemalan communities in 2009. There, they met people who had opened weaving businesses and bakeries thanks to Trickle Up’s local lending programs.