In Bal Joshi’s four years of long-distance running, he’s held onto one central motto: “My race, my pace.”
He doesn’t compare his regimen to other athletes or try to beat anyone’s records.
For Joshi, a 41-year-old banker living in Hurst, his sole focus is to look at his yesterday — and strive for improvement today.
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52 Faces of Community is a Fort Worth Report weekly series spotlighting local unsung heroes. It is sponsored by Central Market, H-E-B and JPS Health Network.
At the end of the year, these rarely recognized heroes will gather for a luncheon where the Report will announce one honoree to represent Tarrant County at the Jefferson Awards in Washington, D.C.
That mindset — one learned over his lifetime and applied only recently to running — led to him completing dozens of marathons, he’s lost count of exactly how many, since 2021, and raising over $200,000 for various charities.
“Compare your yesterday with today: Is it better?” said Joshi, a senior vice president in corporate banking at Hancock Whitney Bank. “My pursuit is to make my tomorrow better than today. Not somebody else’s today.”
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Joshi’s passion and commitment to running for a good cause earned him recognition in 52 Faces of Community, Fort Worth Report’s weekly series highlighting unsung heroes.
Heart of philanthropy, Nepalese roots
Joshi spent his childhood in rural western Nepal in an area torn by civil war. At 18, working as a journalist for state-sponsored media reporting on the war, he started taking in and sheltering children who had lost their parents in the conflict.
He didn’t have much, but he knew a wide network of people in Nepal. With their help, he was able to house, feed and educate the children until they found other caretakers.
“At one point, I was a ‘virgin dad’ with 100 kids,” Joshi said with a smile, citing what a local news article said about him at the time.
His main takeaway from his early philanthropic pursuits? Bringing other people joy in turn brings him joy, he said.
In 2005, Joshi had to flee to the U.S. from a militia group seeking his life. He spent the next few years helping relocate affected Nepalese children from overseas, and eventually became more involved in philanthropy in the U.S.
He’s on the board of directors for United Way of Tarrant County, works with the Irving Healthcare Foundation, and is on the board for Baylor Scott & White Medical Center in Irving.
“Any time that I have extra time, I try to give back through charity work,” he said.
Leah King, former president and CEO of United Way of Tarrant County who serves on the Tarrant Regional Water District board, said Joshi is a “very community-minded, focused individual” as a United Way board member.
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“He does marathons more than most people I know would ever dream,” she said. “He almost always does it in honor of a particular cause. He has a foundation called One Step Foundation that supports other organizations that support folks in the community.”
“(Joshi) is just very focused on helping others and spends a tremendous amount of time when he’s not working to really focus on making sure that people are able to do better for themselves,” King said.
Joshi, King said, is a valuable board member because he was “always the person to remind us who we’re working on behalf of.”
After Joshi’s friend introduced him to running, he ran about 20 marathons before hitting the point of “what’s next?” in 2024.
“Do I just keep adding more marathons, or do I make something useful out of it?” Joshi recalled asking himself.
He committed to running the Everest Marathon, an intense, high-altitude race starting at Everest Base Camp — 17,598 feet above sea level. Working through the One Step Foundation for that race, he raised $42,000 for health, child welfare and heritage preservation efforts in Nepal.
After that, he committed to attaching every athletic event he’s involved in to a charity.
“(Joshi) is just very focused on helping others and spends a tremendous amount of time when he’s not working to really focus on making sure that people are able to do better for themselves.”
Leah King, former president and CEO of United Way of Tarrant County and current Tarrant Regional Water District board member.
In late June, Joshi and his teenage children hiked Mount Kilimanjaro, a 19,000-foot climb. All three worked to raise $19,000 for HIV-affected children in orphanages across Tanzania, where the mountain is located.
“Running is the passion. Philanthropy is the purpose,” Joshi said. “I’m using those two to support other people.”
Through both, he hopes to inspire others to run and devote more of their spare time to helping others, he said, knowing that, in turn, they will be rewarded with satisfaction.
He feels modern culture is too individualistic and finds that harmful to every individual.
“We are just minding our own business and not even knowing what’s going on with our neighbors, but everybody’s doing that. Can we be a little better than that?” he said. “We cannot help everyone, but everyone can help someone — that’s not me, some wise person said that a long time ago.”
Now Joshi spends his spare time training for more intense races, expanding his philanthropic works and thinking about how he could turn his story into a book that could help others once he’s gone.
“There’s nothing fancy about my life,” he said. “It’s just that I was born in a family where helping other people was the most important thing, and that’s exactly what I try to teach my kids.”
Drew Shaw is a government accountability reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at drew.shaw@fortworthreport.org or @shawlings601.
Senior business reporter Eric E. Garcia contributed.
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