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The Parrish Street Legacy Bike, Run, Walk is being built now, and the people who build it are being chosen this week.

Eleven committee chair positions are open for the inaugural year, along with committee service and event weekend volunteering. Applications close Tuesday, September 1.

What a chair does

Each chair leads one part of the festival from planning through event weekend, supported by a member of the event leadership team, and builds the committee that works alongside them. The eleven roles cover everything the weekend needs:

• Cycling, and Run and Walk, covering route design, certification, and city permitting
• Rest Stops and Aid Stations, and Safety and Medical
• Registration, Volunteers, Host Hotel and Hospitality, and the Legacy Dinner
• Vendor Expo, Community Partnerships, and Heritage and Culture

Several work well as a pair, so you can apply with someone.

What it asks, and what it gives

These are volunteer commitments. Responsibility and time vary by role, and we would rather you know that clearly before deciding where you fit.

What comes back is real: leadership of one area of an inaugural event, professional development support, a published chair profile, recognition from the stage at the Legacy Dinner, race entry, and permanent recognition as a member of the inaugural leadership team.

Who this is for

You do not need event production experience. You need to care about how Durham’s story gets told, be willing to carry work between meetings, and be able to say what you will do and then do it.

Everyone applies through the same process and the same deadline, whether we have worked together for years or are meeting you for the first time. Selections are communicated by the end of September.

Parrish Street Legacy Bike, Run, Walk has been selected for Accelerate, a new festival initiative from Durham Next. Thirty organizations applied. Five were chosen.

The award is $100,000 in year one of a multi-year investment, supporting national marketing, cultural programming, public safety operations, and race technology, with the largest share going toward bringing visitors to Durham from outside the region.

Parrish Street is four blocks in downtown Durham that W.E.B. Du Bois visited in 1912 and described as an unmatched display of Black entrepreneurship in America. Black bankers, doctors, lawyers, and business owners built an entire economy there, inside a country that refused to include them in its own. Most people walk those blocks today without knowing what they are standing on.

The festival is built on four pillars: Move, Remember, Celebrate, and Connect. It brings cyclists, runners, and walkers of every level to the same start line on that street.

It is not a race that happens to take place in Durham. It is a celebration of Durham’s Black Wall Street that happens to include a race.

The inaugural Parrish Street Legacy Bike, Run, Walk takes place in Durham in 2027.

For four days in June, Durham hosted the Major Taylor International Cycling Association national convention, and we were the host club.

Riders came from 32 states. They rolled out from downtown Durham together, filled the streets around CCB Plaza, and turned four blocks of the city into something that looked like a family reunion with bikes.

Hosting a national convention is not a small thing for a club founded in 2021. It meant routes, permits, police coordination, hotel blocks, vendors, volunteers, and four days of programming that had to work the first time. Our members showed up and ran it.

What we take from it is not the logistics. It is what the weekend proved: that people will travel to North Carolina for this, that Durham welcomes them, and that a club can produce something at national scale when the community behind it decides to.

That conviction is the reason the Parrish Street Legacy Bike, Run, Walk exists.