Chief Change Officer - Chris Schrader: Turning a Modest Charity into an 8-Figure Marathon for Change – Part One

Episode Date: January 16, 2025

Part One. A simple idea to honor a friend sparked something extraordinary. Today, the 24 Hour Race stands as the largest student-run effort to fight human trafficking. In this episode, Chris Schrader, the founder and executive chairman, reflects on the journey from a single event to a global mission, with students worldwide raising $20 million for this critical cause. Key Highlights of Our Interview: How a Teenage Charity Event Turned into a Global Phenomenon Fighting Human Trafficking “On a typically cold, rainy English day, I suggested to my friends, half-serious, ‘Why don’t we walk across England?’… Sure enough, six months later, we found ourselves walking across England.” “What started as a one-off 24-hour race in 2010 is now the largest student movement fighting slavery in the world, with events in 25 cities and HK$150 million (US$20 million) raised.” Why Young People Shouldn’t Just Write Checks: Teaching the Fiduciary Side of Charity “We want students to view themselves as leaders with the fiduciary responsibility of any charity executive—interviewing project stakeholders to see if the money is really being put to good use.” Charity Is a Marketplace, Not a Moral Obligation “Our audience doesn’t need to care about human trafficking to join the event. If they come just for the music festival or because it’s a big sleepover, that’s fine. Our job is to win them over positively.” Connect with us: Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Chris Schrader ______________________ Chief Change Officer: Make Change Ambitiously. Experiential Human Intelligence for Growth Progressives Global Top 2.5% Podcast on Listen Notes World's #1 Career Podcast on Apple Top 1: US, CA, MX, IE, HU, AT, CH, FI 3.5 Million+ Downloads 80+ Countries

Hi everyone, welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist community for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today's guest is Chris Schrader, founder and executive chairman of 24-hour race, which is a global movement against human trafficking that has raised over 20 million U.S. dollars in the last decade. I've known Chris for almost 10 years. Our first encounter was back in 2016 when I invited him to be a panelist at an event I hosted on education technology. Chris is sharp, well-read, and definitely unconventional. He took a leave of absence from Harvard, spent an extended period of time away, and eventually finished his studies in neuroscience,

while also building and growing tech businesses around the world. Along the way, he founded a charity based on his love for expeditions. And it's safe to say he sees life and business leadership as a journey too. We'll be talking for about an hour, split into two parts. In this episode, part one, we'll dive Part 1 will dive into the genesis and evolution of 24-hour race. What started as a casual suggestion on a rainy day turned into a life-changing journey for teenager. The wall across England raised five figures in U.S. dollar and sparked an eight-figure U.S. dollar global movement. Tomorrow's episode, part two, will focus on Chris' approach to leadership and team building, drawing parallels between leading an expedition and managing a business team.

This episode highlights how lessons learned from life or death situations in the wilderness translate into effective leadership strategies in the corporate world. Chris also offers his heartfelt advice for young, ambitious talents on balancing life goals, family expectations, and career direction. Welcome Chris, welcome to my show. Thank you, thank you remember that I invited you to an in-person event hosted by me back in 2016? And I can't believe that after so many years, I got the second chance of inviting you back now in a virtual format. back, now in a virtual format. Chris, you and I are born and raised in Hong Kong, but I know you have a very interesting multicultural background. Tell us more about that. Sure.

So, I'm a third generation Hong Konger. My grandparents moved here in 1960. My grandmother's family had been in Indonesia as Dutch colonists for something like 300 years. Her father and her uncles were all in government in the last colonial government of Indonesia. And of course after World War II they moved back to the Netherlands. And my grandmother was half Indonesian and she never quite felt like she fit in. So when she met my grandfather and he proposed, she agreed on the condition that they would find their way back to Asia. And sure enough, a few years later, they moved to Hong Kong and got married in Hong Kong

just a few days after moving in. And less than a few years later, less than a year later, my mother was born here. And I was actually a similar product. So my mother who grew up in Hong Kong and went to school here, went to the Netherlands, found herself a hub and basically said, if you want to marry me, you've got to find your way back to Hong Kong.

And that was my father who was studying medicine at the time. For him to get qualified as a doctor, he had to go spend a year of training in London. And I have been there. Be Catholic accident, I think is the way to put it. But within a few months of my birth, we were all back in Hong Kong. And the rest of my siblings, one of four, were all born in Hong Kong. So I grew up really at the tail end of Hong Kong's colonial era. And I had for all intents and purposes, a really happy childhood and upbringing.

I got to the age of about 13 or 14, and then I went to school in the UK. I went to a small boarding school with a military background. Up until this point, you had what seemed like an uneventful childhood. But then something happened while you were attending boarding school in Britain that planted the seed for what would later become the 24-hour race. Can you dive into that? Could you share more about what happened in detail?

While there, one of the more defining events in my life happened, and that was the passing away of a childhood friend of mine who had a rare congenital illness. At the age of 14, I didn't have money, I didn't have resources, I didn't have any talents to contribute to his legacy, but I figured what's something I could do

that would encourage people with resources, with money, to maybe join that fight. And so on a typically cold, rainy English day, me and a few friends were sitting together talking about, of course, our summer plans. And it was a joke and kind of in a serious way I suggested, why don't we walk across England? And I remember all of my friends laughing lightheartedly, except for one who looked at me dead straight

and said, let's do it. And sure enough, through the support of parents, teachers, and friends, six months later, myself and my friend found ourselves walking across England, albeit the short way, that is the length way rather than up to Scotland. So we started at Land's End in the southwesternmost point of the UK and walked back to our school just outside of Reading, post London.

And in the process of that, we raised something like 200,000 Hong Kong dollars, which was more than I could have possibly imagined. Perhaps more importantly, we raised a ton of awareness about the plight of people suffering from illnesses that are so rare, they basically don't get any attention from the pharmaceutical industry. And this began my journey of protest, a type of protest, that is pushing yourself physically and mentally for causes that you deeply care about. I ended up getting a scholarship to come back to Hong Kong and study at United World College.

And me and my friend, we wanted to do something, a kind of 2.0 of our first expedition. And so where I was on his home turf in the UK for the first round, the idea was he could fly over to Hong Kong and we do our 2.0 there. The problem with doing an expedition in Hong Kong is that a walk across Hong Kong Island is something you just do with your girlfriend on any day of the week as a recreational kind of easy afternoon. So we needed to come up with something a little bit more challenging. Li Po Chun the school is in Sai Kung, which is this beautiful part of Hong Kong where you have mountains, beaches, hiking trails.

It's basically one big national park and my school was pretty close to that area. trails. It's basically one big national park. And my school was pretty close to that area. So we figured we'd kind of develop an itinerary that took us from my school all the way down to Hong Kong Island. And that ended up becoming a runny swim and row of 150 kilometers, which we aim to complete within 24 hours. So from walking, we were moving more into the more energetic and quick world of endurance sports, running and rowing and swimming. We began that journey, I believe, in May 2010. I was 16 and my friend Charles was 16. And through, again, wonderful support from friends, family and community,

we managed to complete that in 23 hours and 57 minutes. So just in the nick of time and in the process raised about another 300,000 Hong Kong dollars. At this point, I had so many friends had asked me about these many sort of expeditions and how they themselves could do something similar. And so it was on my mind, how could I provide this platform connecting endurance activities, pushing yourself mentally and physically so far that people think you're a little bit crazy and want to know the reason why. And of course, the reason why being philanthropy, being charity. So I came up with a pretty simple concept, nothing new,

a 24-hour race. Why did I pick 24 hours? Because it felt like something anyone could do, regardless of whether you were a seasoned athlete or not. The 24-hour race is participated in teams of eight, so you do laps in this team and that sort of relay style race. And if you're tired, you tag yourself out and the friend goes, if you're feeling good, you do a couple laps. You can run, you can walk, you can jog in some cases that you can crawl. So the platform felt accessible to everyone. What was harder was picking a course.

I knew from my two expeditions with Charles that when things were really tough, it was our respective causes that gave us the energy to carry on. But how did you end up transforming the whole race into a movement against human trafficking? By nature, me picking rare diseases wasn't something I thought every student could buy into. So there was a teacher at my school who I got along very closely with because he himself was ex-military. He was a huge six foot eight Irish ex-paratrooper.

And I think he was a national athlete. And he said, have you heard about human trafficking? And if I thought of human trafficking at the time, I assumed it was Liam Neeson style take in gorgeous young woman gets kidnapped by rich shake on the streets of Paris, rather than what we know of the issue as today. I was curious and he introduced me to one cause he was working with which was the trafficking of children from rural communities in Nepal into circuses in India where they were subject to all kinds of abuse and the situation was so horrific it didn't take me long to say yeah, this is something that any student could buy in.

But it's important to know I didn't really know anything about human trafficking or modern slavery. I really just cared about sharing the experience of pushing yourself for a good cause, which in my view was life transformational. The 24-Hour Race, the first event took place in 2010 and was originally supposed to be a one-off event. I remember actually pitching it to teachers at various schools in Hong Kong,

and they were sympathetic but ultimately dismissive, because the idea that their students, who they could struggle to recruit for charity walkathons, would be giving their free weekends to run 24 hours on SOT, seemed a little comical. And so in the end, after fruitless pictures with I wanna say over a dozen schools, we ended up working directly with students. And we asked students to put together their own teams.

We asked students to help us organize the actual event, which was hosted in a public place, so it required all sorts of permits and fundraising efforts. And that turned out to be the magic ingredient that has propelled the 24-hour race since, which is a movement by students for students. Now I want to emphasize the first event was really intended as a one-off event. We would do this relay race one time and that would be it. But it became so popular in its first year that it was clear we needed a successor. In fact,

I think we were oversubscribed by twice the number of participants we had capacity for. So at that time, I thought, I've learned so much from putting this first event together. It's been like a mini MBA for me as a 16, 17 year old. Rather than doing it myself, why don't we give this opportunity to another cohort of students? And at the time, I just asked people,

raise their hands if they wanted to be a director. And sure enough, the first generation of directors took the leadership. Since then, the 24-hour race is a global phenomenon. It's the largest student movement fighting slavery in the world. We're in 25 cities. We've had something like a thousand directors

pass through our program and many tens of thousands of runners. And we've probably raised around 150 million Hong Kong dollars to support various anti-trafficking initiatives around the world. So I guess my origin story really started with a kind of accident, a personal crusade to do something in memory of a friend of mine, and then expanded into a global movement. I do want to give a caveat though, that wasn't the goal I had in mind and it was a very unexpected result. I had no premonition the 24 hour race would still be around today, you know 14 years after its first event, let alone doing as well as it is in spite of events like COVID.

So I had, if you want to use a sort of Thelian analogy, I had some secret about the world, although I wasn't really aware of it. And that secret was that young people in the age of health and safety and helicopter parenting wanted independent opportunities and they wanted risk and they wanted to push themselves physically and mentally beyond what anyone around them would think is possible. I had experiences myself, but I figured students would enjoy that too.

That was really the foundation, and I think that was luck. I believed in it, and have the right support around me, but I don't think, I don't really think that there was any sort of genius inception moment for the 24 hour race movement in spite of its success since then. So exactly how much have you raced over the last 10 years or so?

I would say at least 150 million Hong Kong. Wow, that's 150 million Hong Kong. That is about how much in the US, like 20? Yeah, 20 million US roughly. Yeah, yeah. And for that is a big chunk of money you've raised over the years. Yeah, I would say so. But I'm careful. I think there are people who, or rather than just people, there are organizations that

raise that sort of money overnight. Our main strength, we quickly realized, wasn't in... Raising money was imported, and we picked the charity partners that we work with because we ourselves are not an anti-human trafficking grassroots NGO. We don't have staff working with police and government legal officials. The combat human trafficking, we can selectively fund programs. The main strength was that hundreds of thousands, I believe over a million people have directly participated in 24-hour race events.

The fact that over a million young people at formative stages of their lives who will go on to do all sorts of different things, take on different careers, have this extremely memorable experience that we talk about at the 24-hour race and the board these days about creating life-defining moments through the race, something you, we use the phrase, something you're proud to tell your grandkids about one day. When I was your age, I ran a 24-hour race. Mean that with a little bit of irony.

That impression and its connection to the race leads to big differences in how these people then address the issue in their later careers. And I can give you a concrete example of this. I'm no longer operationally involved in the race. I sit on the board. Our CEO, Daniel, is fantastic. He's taken over the helm actually. Daniel was a first generation racer. So he joined our race in 2010 and ran it for several years and then eventually

came back and joined us 10 years later as the CEO of the organization. And he was telling me about a particular participant who knew nothing about human trafficking, learned about it through the race, became quite positively engaged and went on to work for a law firm. And at this law firm, they realized they didn't have any kind of anti-human trafficking provisional with how they work for clients. And so he proposed this to the partners and the partners immediately adopted it. And they actually let go of several clients because they were not adhering to supply chain conditions that would ensure that those supply chains were human trafficking

free. So in lots of small ways, that's how we hope to make a difference. I don't think that's a small way at all. It's actually a big way. But in many ways, like that's where we think the biggest difference will be. You know, it's not about raising hundreds of millions, even though that has an impact, it saves lives, it's important. It's more the awareness and advocacy that comes with young people becoming particularly engaged with an issue. I was wondering, while raising money isn't your main focus, when you do receive a significant amount of money, how do you

use it? How do you allocate those funds to create the most impact? Yes, when we raise a dollar, 80 to 90 cents of that will go towards charitable activities. And those can be direct support for our partner NGOs. Right now we work with a global partner, A21, who has anti-human trafficking initiatives at the grassroots level all across Asia and indeed in the United States too. And so we work closely with them to identify projects that we think will resonate with students that will encourage them to engage with the cause and fund it. And then the rest is awareness and advocacy through the 24-hour race, through its events, etc. So right now we're operating at around a 90% efficiency mark towards every dollar that

gets generated, whether that's through ticket sales or fundraising efforts, which we're fairly happy around. So basically, you allocate the funds across different NGOs, all of them are involved in fighting against human trafficking. Is that how you turned the money into real action? The students themselves are still, to this day, organizing our races.

We get them to engage with the leaders in these NGOs to understand what's happening, what it is exactly that they're funding. And we want them to view this as leaders with the kind of fiduciary responsibility of any charity executive. You know, your student director in a country like Hong Kong or Singapore, wherever, will directly interview

these project stakeholders to determine whether it's a good use of cash or not. And that in itself is a really important lesson for a lot of young people who just write checks blankly, right? A lot of not even young people, a lot of us, and this is a personal fever of mine, but a lot of us relegate our charitable activities to annual contributions to NGOs without really knowing too much about the mechanics of where that money is going.

And I believe to some extent that it's much easier to write a check for a good cause than it is to actively engage with a particular issue. Because of course time is the most important commodity that anyone has. So we try to get the students to engage a bit more, to be a little bit more, to have a little bit more scrutiny in terms of thinking about where they put money and why, and understanding that there are trade-offs, and understanding that there is a market. This is something as well, I believe. We live in a very morally scrupulous age where causes compete for primacy, but that combined with social media can be pretty bad in my opinion, right? Where on lots and lots of issues, people are forced to take a stance on a non-profit issue

without really understanding anything about those dynamics. And our view of the 24 hours, for example, we're very clear with the student directors is our audience doesn't need to really know anything or care about human trafficking at all. Yeah, they don't need to know anything. In fact, if we attract people to come to one of our events, to attract students to come to our events, because they think it's a big sleepover and there's a great music festival tonight,

which is true, we do that, that's fine. We're not trying to convince people to support us by making them feel bad that they're not taking a particular stance. And quite frankly, if someone was to come to a race and say, I don't really care about human trafficking, I'm just going to buy boats from wherever I do, whatever. I don't think we try and judge them for it. At least that's what we advocate. Our job is to win you over in a positive way.

But we also respect that much like there are hundreds of different, I don't know, clothing brands that are trying to sell you their product, there are many charities if not more, try to convince you that they're the ones that need support most. We just operate in this wider marketplace of causes, and I figure that the best way to win over allies and people to our cause is by having the best time, by putting together the best events, and by having the greatest community. And if people don't engage with the cause, that's fine too. I feel like we have a much larger impact in any case through just winning attention in the conventional sense.

In the last 30 minutes, Chris shared his journey from a humble teenage charity event to leading a global movement valued at over 20 million U.S. dollars. His experiences, whether trekking through dachshunds and scouting mountains, have shaped his understanding of business leadership and team building. In the next episode, Releasing Tomorrow, we'll dive deeper into Chris' leadership approach, drawing parallels between leading expeditions and managing business teams. He will show how lessons learned from life or death situations in the wilderness can translate into powerful leadership strategies in the corporate world.

Chris also shares heartfelt advice for young, ambitious talents on how to balance life goals, family expectations, and career direction. See you. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you like what you heard, don't forget, subscribe to our show, leave us top rated reviews, check out our website, and follow me on social media. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host.

Until next time, take care.