Everything a journalist or storyteller might need.
The Board Walks is a weekly 5-mile walk for real conversation, founded in Austin and now operating in 18 cities across four countries.
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Below: the numbers, boilerplate, founder bios, and topics we speak to.
To schedule an interview:
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Quick facts
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20,000+
Attendees since 2022
500+
5-mile walks hosted
20+
Walks attended per regular
(they keep coming back!)
18+
Cities around the world​
200+
Walks hosted in Austin alone
10,000+
Steps per walk
$0
Spent on advertising
(pure word of mouth)
2,500+
Miles walked together around the world
100%
Organic growth
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Monks & Tech Bros
Austin Walk #100
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London's Calling
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Small Town, Big Talk
BY THE NUMBERS
Proof that connection scales — one walk,
one city, one conversation at a time
Last updated: August 10, 2026
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Founded: July 2022 in Austin, Texas
Leadership: Elle Beecher Hogan and Cameron Hogan
Started with: One tweet and eight people (full origin story)
Attendees to date: 20,000+
Free walks hosted: 500+
Cities: 18
Countries: 4
Cost to attend: $0. Always has been.
Spent on advertising: $0. Also always has been.
Growth: 100% word of mouth
Organic social impressions: 1,000,000+ per month average
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Newsletter subscribers: 4,500+ (The Friday Debrief)
Distance per walk: 5 miles. Roughly 10,000 steps, roughly two hours.
Repeat rate: Regulars attend 20+ walks
Walks hosted in Austin alone: 200+
Consecutive Saturdays Elle hosted personally: 156, for three years
Miles walked together worldwide: 2,500+
Who shows up: Thoughtful, growth-oriented adults, mostly mid-20s through 40s. All ages welcome, and we mean it: babies to 75-year-olds.
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Where we're going: 100+ cities
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Any lingering questions might be answered in our FAQ page.
Boilerplate
Copy you can lift directly.
Our mission, in one line:
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To make real connection a weekly habit again.
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Short (25 words)
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The Board Walks is a weekly 5-mile walk where strangers have real conversations. Free. Phone-free. Founded in Austin in 2022, now in 18 cities worldwide.
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Medium (60 words)
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The Board Walks is a weekly 5-mile walk that happens every Saturday in 18 cities. Attendees bring one honest question, leave their phones in their pockets, and walk with strangers for two hours. Founded in Austin in July 2022 by Elle Beecher Hogan, it has grown from eight people to more than 20,000 entirely through word of mouth.
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Long (110 words)
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The Board Walks is a 5-mile walk with a simple mission: to make real connection a weekly habit again. Every Saturday, in 18 cities worldwide, strangers meet at a trailhead, pocket their phones, and walk two hours together while talking about the things most people only think about at 2 AM.
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Founded in Austin in 2022 by Elle Beecher Hogan, a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and seven-year Meta veteran, it began with a single tweet and eight attendees. It has since grown to more than 20,000 participants with zero advertising spend. The Board Walks is free, and always will be.
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On the name:
The Board Walks, capital T, capital B, capital W. Not Boardwalks. Not The Board Walk. The Board is a separate thing, so the plural matters.
Our story
The easy version is "walking club goes global."
That version is fine... but it barely scratches the surface.
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We didn't build a walking club.
We built a weekly gathering spot that happens to move five miles.
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We believe the loneliness crisis is an environment problem.​ Third places vanished and we replaced them with feeds. Most people aren't starved for interactions: they're drowning in them. What's missing is an interaction that goes somewhere, on a consistent rhythm, in a low-stakes environment that makes it feel safe to open up.
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So we stopped trying to fix people and fixed the room instead. Phones away. Five miles. No pitching, no dating, no agenda. Bring one honest question. Be a good neighbor.
Get the constraints right and depth becomes the path of least resistance.
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The second thing people miss: this grew and sustained since 2022 by turning people away.
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Most gathering spaces grow by opening the doors wider.
We grew by tending a fence.
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We give direct social feedback. We respectfully ask misaligned people not to come back. It's the least viral thing about us and the single biggest reason walk regulars keep telling us some version of the same sentence:
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"Every community I've been in eventually fell apart. Except this one."
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The part that surprises reporters every time:
Four years and 500+ walks in, the thing people talk about isn't the walking.
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Attendees describe it as a "friendship accelerator." Hundreds of people have directly credited the walks with being their anchor in a season of transition, like: moving to a new city, making friends beyond their coworkers, or putting themselves out there after an accidental case of post-pandemic anxiety.
When you bring people together in this environment, they transform. We don't promise it, so the pressure is off, and that's part of why it happens. We call it the smile transformation: Week 1 arrivals look cautious, a little braced, like they're waiting to find out what the catch is. Week 20 regulars glow.
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We can't put that on a chart. It's still the metric we care about most.
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One last thing that makes us unique:
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Since 2022, The Board Walks movement has been funded entirely by the personal savings and energy of its founders.
Elle hosted the walk every Saturday for three years, using it to heal herself and refine the signature community method, and her partner Cameron is currently hosting the walk every week in Austin, Texas. Elle worked at Meta for seven years, quitting in 2024 to grow this movement with Cameron a few months after they met and fell in love.
This is a deeply personal mission for us as a couple.
It's an act of devotion that makes so little logical sense that people often ask us "What's the catch?" There isn't one. We're on the planet right now to provide this hyper-effective solution for the loneliness crisis, as an act of love and service, during the most disconnected and dysregulated time in human history.
Our volunteer hosts feel the same calling, and they get asked "Why do you do this for free?" regularly. Their answer matches ours.
To offer the walks as a free service and preserve their integrity, we've built an ecosystem around them, including: a weekly newsletter, a podcast, daily social media, and Elle and Cameron's newsletters and audiences. As of August 2026, we are seeking partnerships to help us grow to over 100 cities.
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The humans
Founder bios, press-ready
Elle Beecher, Founder
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One line:
Elle Beecher Hogan is the founder of The Board Walks, a free 5-mile walk for real conversation now in 18 cities aiming to make connection a weekly habit.
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Short:
Elle Beecher Hogan is the founder of The Board Walks, a 5-mile walk for real conversations now in 18 cities across four countries. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, she spent seven years at Meta before leaving to rebuild consistent, low-stakes gathering places for a world that quietly lost them.
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Long:
Elle Beecher Hogan calls herself a connection architect: she designs the conditions where people can hit it off, then gets out of the way. She spent seven years at Meta and a lifetime building popular online spaces before she had a word for what she was doing. (The first one was on Neopets, in elementary school.) She founded The Board Walks in Austin in 2022 because she needed it first, hosted it herself for 156 consecutive Saturdays, and has since built an entire world around it with her partner Cameron: The Friday Debrief, the Whimsy World podcast, and The Board. Her mission is to make real connection a weekly habit again. She was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 for this work.
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Cameron Hogan, Head of Expansion
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One line:
Cameron Hogan is Head of Expansion at The Board Walks.
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Short:
Cameron Hogan is Head of Expansion at The Board Walks. He built the host network and systems that let the walk exist in 18 cities without losing the intimacy and trust that makes it work.
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Long:
Cam is the reason The Board Walks travels. Elle built the first community in Austin, Texas. After they met and fell in love in 2024, Cam built the infrastructure underneath it: the host relationships, the systems, the careful machinery under the soulful part. He was the first man to host the original Austin walk, breaking a long streak of women hosts, and he brings the same curiosity to a spreadsheet that he brings to a conversation about whether babies have souls. (Real walk topic. Same morning as a conversation about the economy. That's the range.)
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Elle and Cam are partners in the work and in life, which means the culture of this thing was born and raised in their many conversations about human nature. They co-host the podcast Whimsy World.
Interviews
What we love talking about
On the record, on background, or on a trail.
Whichever helps.
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Topics we can speak to with actual receipts:
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The third place, and what happens when you rebuild one on purpose. Four years of watching what a physical, repeated, phone-free gathering does to a person's week.​
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Why community management is the whole game. We're known for a particular style of it: direct social feedback, respectfully asking misaligned people not to return, protecting a culture instead of maximizing a headcount. We've helped other organizations implement it.​
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Design constraints as the cure for surface-level everything. Why the no-phones, no-pitching, no-dating rules exist, and what happened during the year Elle experimented without them like a mad scientist.
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How something reaches 18 cities on a $0 ad budget. Movements don't go viral. They compound.​
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Walking, side by side, and why people say things on a trail they'd never say across a table. Therapists have known this forever. We put it outside and added strangers.
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Sober social infrastructure. Almost every adult friendship in America is built around a drink. What happens when you build one at 8 AM instead.​
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Men's friendship at mile three. One of the most consistent and least-covered things we see. We've written about the male friend recession.​
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Leaving Big Tech to build gathering places. Elle's seven years at Meta, and what she learned about connection there that she couldn't use until she left.​
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What it takes to keep something free. Four years, zero cover charge, and the deliberate choices underneath that.
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To read more of our philosophies, check out our long-form Trail Tales.
Who we can connect you with
Walk hosts, in specific cities across four countries. They see the same trail every week and notice things we don't.
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Longtime regulars, including people who've attended 20, 50, and 100+ times. These are your best interviews. They can tell you what changed and when. (There are long-form stories with direct attribution on the bottom of our Contact page.)
First-timers, willing to be followed through a first walk if you want the arc in real time.
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Stories from the trail, collected every week in The Friday Debrief and our long-form blog.
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A standing offer: the best way to write about this is to walk it. See if we're in your city, and join us. Five miles, no phone, one topic. We'll save you a spot in the circle and otherwise leave you alone.
Get in touch
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Press and media inquiries:
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Working on a deadline? Put it in the subject line and we'll move.
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We answer. Usually within a couple of days, occasionally from a trail.
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Austin Walk #1
San Francisco, CA
Austin Walk #100
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Detroit, Michigan
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Aveiro, Portugal
London, UK
Atlanta, Georgia
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Miami, Florida
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Columbus, Ohio
Sacramento, CA
The world, in one glance:
​The Board Walks are where it happens.
The Friday Debrief is where we tell you what happened.
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Whimsy World is our media home for great conversations.
The Board is the private room.
And underneath all of it is one idea:
The right environment changes who you get to be.
