Kennedy receives Sovereignty in Action Award to support annual 5km Red Dress Run

By Laura E. Young

THUNDER BAY — A few years ago, Kim Kennedy dreamed she was dancing in a red Jingle dress at Boulevard Lake in Thunder Bay. The park and reservoir remain a place of contrasts—a spot where people come to walk and connect with nature, but one also marked by violence and loss.

Kennedy, a member of the Red Rock Indian Band, living in Thunder Bay, didn’t know what her dream meant, only that she had to honour it.

And so, she launched The Red Dress Run, a 5km run/walk held on May 5 as part of honouring and remembering Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls (MMIWG), and Two-Spirit people.

The race was held in 2025 and 2026 at Boulevard Lake and it will continue to thrive.

Kennedy recently won one of four 2026 Sovereignty in Action Awards from Indigenous Climate Action (ICA). ICA promotes Indigenous rights and knowledge as critical to resolving the climate crisis and achieving social justice. Their prize comes with a $2,500 financial renumeration.

“It’s an honour to be individually recognized, but it’s really a community win. Thunder Bay, we won this together,” Kennedy reflects. “To me, it’s Thunder Bay [that] did something as a community. I would like it reflected more as that, less than as an individual achievement.”

She does play a key role in the run but notes that “it’s not possible to have the aftermath and the beauty of what the event is without everybody coming together.”

The organizing team for The Red Dress Run includes Kennedy, Robyn Barber, Allana Morrison, and Tawnee Thompson.

“They are a tremendous group of women. They bring laughter,” Kennedy says. “You’re sitting with a group of women, where you’re talking about the heaviest things, but they can bring healing. They are truly remarkable.”

Her children are also involved: her daughter dances and drums; and her son hands out water bottles as people cross the finish line.

They chose a 5km run to get people outside, connected to the land, and motivated towards healthy living. They leaned on the support of Thunder Bay’s passionate running and athletic community.

Local police services, every Northside organization, and Indigenous artists, speakers, and Elders attended; all offering an opportunity to amplify Indigenous voices and generate community conversations that foster healing, Kennedy mentions.

“Regardless, if you’re Indigenous or not, it’s an education opportunity for everybody. We all get to learn. When you know better, you can do better the next time.”

The ICA Award works in a way that reduces as many barriers as it can. In that respect, groups or individuals can nominate themselves.

Kennedy drew from her unique position as an urban Indigenous woman and parent with lived experience. She is also well-educated with a strong background in sociology. She’s entering her final year of Indigenous social work studies at Laurentian University.

The emerging writer hails from a family of leaders that takes political action. Her paternal grandmother, Betty Kennedy, is the CEO of Feathers of Hope, an organization that empowers youth to make positive change in their communities.

Kim Kennedy was well aware of the effects of funding cuts.

“Thunder Bay, now more than ever, is going to need a grassroots initiative, something that is going to survive the ebbs and flows of leadership changes,” Kennedy says. “I’m also aware of how funding can rise and collapse with the shift in leadership, just from municipal to provincial level, and how it impacts citizens.”

Intertwine that with the ongoing MMIWG horrors and she could not sit in silence. Nor did she want the run to end after two years.

In her application to the ICA, Kennedy explained her backstory, the life-changing cultural healing she has undertaken, and spoke to the success of the run’s first year and plans for the 2026 event.

She detailed what they would do with the grant money to create a “meaningful, active strategy that protects the community now, and that’s what stood out to them I believe,” Kennedy says.

The third run will be held May 5, 2027.

Kennedy is also creating a toolkit or template so others can do the run in their communities.

To help promote the 2027 event, she is pricing wearable, personal alarms to purchase in order to promote community safety, “especially for women runners so they don’t feel deterred from being active, especially in beautiful, wooded areas and especially alone at night,” she says.

Kennedy will graduate from Laurentian in the Spring of 2027. For most of her life, people have told her she should be a lawyer.

While she has always been interested in that field, she doesn’t see herself going into law school anytime soon.

“I do want to have a very thorough lived experience in various aspects of social services. I see myself going into violence prevention work, gang prevention work, human trafficking. The nitty gritty of the social crisis I see myself doing for a substantial time before I would want to go to law school.”

She’s been in school for five consecutive years while parenting and actively pursuing her writing.

“But in the future, I’m open to wherever the Creator takes me. This all started for me with a dream. I didn’t understand it yet, but little did I know I was going to become an Indigenous social worker who focused on dream methodology and championing that into sociology,” she recalls. “It all comes full circle. What should we do around [Boulevard Lake] once a year? I just trust the process and sometimes, I don’t need to have it all figured out right now.”