Mission

To create a grassroots global community for good. To raise £1M+ for the UN Global Goals.

Category

Disaster Relief

Additional Information

The World Relay is a social business designed to harness the simple power of running to sustainably build a grassroots world community and bring people together around huge causes and leave a lasting impact on the world. It is a continuous running relay that travels 18,800 miles round the world. A world first. 50,000 runners will run 10 mile segments passing a baton to each other. Raising upwards of £1M for charity. It starts in London in May 2017 and ends 6 months later back in London. By that time £1M will have been raised for Ashoka to elect and suport social entreprenrial projects in every country we pass through and twenty thousand people will have touched the relay baton. As a knock on effect the relay will build an international community breaking down barriers and building international cooperation by uniting people from all backgrounds at grassroots levels. As the only event of its kind, it will not only raise in excess of £1/2M but it will show the world what humans are capable of when they work together.  How it works As trailed in One Run For Boston (US Relay – see below) the 18,000 mile journey will be split into 1,800 sections. These sections will be released to the public through our website TheWorldRelay.com where people will be able to sign up for a fee to run the stage at a particular time. Guidelines to how much this fee should be will be given but runners will be encouraged to give what they can afford (ie guideline for the US will be $50, guideline for India will be 300Rs). The World Relay baton will be passed from stage to stage and runner to runner sequentially, running 24hrs a day, until the baton has circumnavigated the globe and returned back to London. In all the cities there will be group stages which will be ‘party stages’ which will have hundreds if not thousands of participants.  One Run For Boston On July 1st 2013, One Run For Boston made history by becoming the first ever non-stop running relay to cross America. Over 3500 runners helped complete the 3300 mile journey from Los Angeles to Boston through scorching deserts, apocalyptic storms and suffocating humidity. In 2014, One Run For Boston returned to blaze an even brighter trail across America. One year on from the bombings, many of the survivors who had been injured in the blasts joined 1000 runners for the final stage of the relay and crossing the finish line on Boylston Street together, reclaiming it as their own. The relay raised $600,000 for the One Fund Boston to help victims of the Boston Marathon bombings and an inspirational running community was born. One Run For Boston became a symbol of hope and positivity that inspired a powerful grassroots movement and continues to unite the running community today. One Run For Boston has become a living, breathing demonstration of the transformative power of running. People running for those who no longer can. The One Run For Boston Facebook page received 5 million hits and it’s own website received 3 million. These platforms showcased the runners videos and photographs to the wider world who were able to directly interact with them by watching the baton being passed between runners through a GPS tracking device that fed directly to the website. Facebook even used One Run For Boston as a case study to advertise the power for Facebook to do good. Why it’s unique The World Relay would be a Guinness World Record for longest running relay at 3650 miles from Calais to Tehran. It will also be a world first (the World Record for First Relay Circumnavigation is pending with Guinness). Running events tend to be race only affairs. You travel in, run your race and then travel home. You rarely get the chance to impact the world we live in, nor the opportunity to become part of a grassroots community -  to be supported by all walks of life. The World Relay is about creating social change through running in the community, pushing people to experience new things, and start a conversation that may just impact this world more than any physical change. No other company in the world is doing anything like this this right now.