MoveShake Video #3: Humanitarian, Adventurer of the Year Shannon Galpin

Each Thursday in June we’ll be featuring a different film from the MoveShake film series. This week’s film is about Shannon Galpin, founder of Mountain2Mountain and a 2013 Adventurer of the Year.

When you meet Shannon Galpin, you’re immediately affected by the glowing energy that fuels her work with her nonprofit, Mountain2Mountain. Mountain2Mountain focuses on improving women’s rights in conflict areas. And right now, the majority of Shannon’s work is in Afghanistan.

The last few years have had their challenges for Shannon and M2M. Despite these hurdles she has kept her chin high. No one ever said it was going to be easy, and Shannon will be the first to tell you that.

Shannon’s attempt to make a difference for women’s rights is deeply rooted in her own life story. Shannon was a rape victim at the age of 19, and years later, when she was pregnant with her daughter, her only sister, who was in college at the time, suffered the same horrific tragedy. When Shannon was driving to the hospital to see her sister, there was one word that kept coming back into her head:  “Enough.”

Shannon described in her interview a certain panic that rose up in her that day. She knew that her own daughter would be coming into a world where this happens–what if it happened to her?   As horrendous as these events were in her life, Shannon describes them as shaping her into the person she is today, as a powerful force that drove her to do the work she does now.