She’s here! @BlairBraverman & team have reached the burled arch in Nome! #UglyDogs @IditarodKTVA #Iditarod2019 pic.twitter.com/i8DWN1YXY7
— Daniella Rivera (@RiveraDanie) March 17, 2019
Blair Braverman (previously at Neatorama) and her team finished her first Iditarod on Sunday. Braverman's social media fans call themselves the #UglyDogs. During the race, they got busy raising funds for a remote Alaskan school. They raised $7,000 in 24 hours to help fund a school trip for fourth-graders at Top of the Kuskokwim School in Nikolai. When that project was funded they turned to other school projects listed at DonorsChoose.org.
A few hundred miles into the race, teachers started hugging me in villages. “We haven’t been able to buy new glue sticks in six months, but now my classroom will have a garden and a project to get girls into engineering!” one woman told me. I happy cried all the way up the Yukon. https://t.co/q3jggsswpF
— Blair Braverman (@BlairBraverman) March 17, 2019
The #UglyDogs accomplished other things, too. Braverman finished 36th out of a field of 52, but her Twitter followers ballooned to over 75,000. -via Metafilter