Noah Campbell, 18, has made the most of his gap year after finishing high school.
Campbell, a class of 2024 graduate of Oak Park and River Forest High School and an incoming freshman at the University of North Carolina, has used the time since his graduation to create a fundraising project to support the kind of charities that brought his family to Oak Park in the first place. Campbell’s younger sister Ella has Down syndrome, and inspired by her experience he created the 47k Challenge, a project that encouraged local businesses and community members to donate to the Best Buddies organization in honor of him running a distance greater than a marathon along Chicago’s lakeshore.
Campbell raised about $2,500 for the charity that supports people with developmental disabilities and their families. It was one of the happiest moments of his life, he said.
“I really want to help Best Buddies keep growing and expand to more chapters across Illinois,” he said.
It was the resources available to families of children with Down syndrome like the Best Buddies program that brought his family to the village from Arizona when Campbell and his sister were young, he said.
“We really came to this community to find this better support for her,” he said. “We just found this community because it’s really supported people with special needs, it has lots of great resources, like Oak Leyden especially, that were really helpful. This is just a fantastic place to live in and to raise a family.”
He said he and Ella are very close, and they enjoy spending time together singing Disney music and dancing to K-Pop.
School of Rock, Battistoni-Beam-Polivka Orthodontics and Tennis and Fitness Centre of Oak Park and River Forest were among the local businesses that supported the project.
Campbell came up with the distance of 47 kilometers as a reference to the number of chromosomes people with Down syndrome are born with. The distance equates to about 29.2 miles.
He first attempted the challenge in 2023, but broke up the distance over multiple runs. This year, he ran it all in one go.
It was only a few years ago that Campbell struggled to run a mile, so the distance reminds him of the strength his sister has shown to conquer her daily challenges, he said.
“I looked at my sister who was doing unimaginably hard things every day,” he said. “So it was like, ‘well, if she was doing this, I could do this.’”
Campbell hopes to grow the challenge into a yearly event raising money for the cause, inviting more people to participate alongside him.
“I definitely want to keep expanding this challenge. This is really something that I was really proud to help build,“ he said. “By helping expand this event, bring some more runners, maybe making this more of a city-wide thing and helping to work with more local businesses, ideally I get help to expand the Best Buddies program to help it make this great impact.”