In early June, NYU rising juniors Cade Hoppe and Riley Demps, both members of the Violets’ men’s basketball team, quickly put together a run-a-thon to raise money for an organization aiming to reduce police violence. Even they could not have imagined how successful it would be as they helped raise $65,000 that went directly to Campaign Zero.
A Quick Turnaround Garnering Immediate Support
“We came up with the idea on a Monday and the next day was blackout Tuesday (black boxes posted on Instagram to support the Black Lives Matter movement),” Hoppe explained. “We both posted on our regular (Instagram) feeds on Wednesday with a flyer on how to join. This was four days before the run.”
With such a short turnaround, the duo tempered their expectations. “We didn’t expect to raise a lot of money,” Demps stated. “We thought it would be great to get $10,000, but thought maybe we could raise $5,000.”
They were both soon encouraged by the number of people liking and sharing their posts. “We realized we were doing a good job when people neither of us knew were texting us,” Demps shared. One of his friends from his hometown of New Orleans, who attends school in San Diego, started “sorority squares” for runs where people could pledge money for runners. “People love to see that they are making a difference,” Hoppe added. “Boards could have $150 worth of squares on them and when people see those squares filling up, they know they are making a difference for the runner and the cause.”
Organizing Every Aspect of the Run
Demps started a Google sheet with each volunteer’s name, number, and email. “It was a great idea, though we didn’t know what we would do with it,” Hoppe admitted. “We wanted to cast a wide net and use it at some point.” They ended up inputting the information individually while also putting together a statement describing the event.
Hoppe spent much of one night coming up with the verbiage for the statement. ““We were being diligent about providing each runner with the information they needed,” he said. “I woke up to a novel he wrote,” Demps laughed. “It was all really good, but it was long. I sent it to him in text format so he could see how long it actually was.” Hoppe got the message quickly. “It looked like a messy breakup,” he joked.
While Hoppe continued to hone the message, Demps did the editing and used a Nike application for the run that he had used previously. “We had to make our message more scalable because the run-a-thon was getting bigger than we expected it to be,” Hoppe said. The app aspect ended up getting complicated, again because they underestimated the project’s reach. “If we had known two weeks earlier that we would raise so much money and have more than 180 runners, I probably could have made an app myself,” Demps remarked.
Their opposing styles worked to make them an effective team. Hoppe is a business major in NYU’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business, while Demps majors in mechanical engineering in the Tandon School of Engineering. “We had the perfect partnership,” Hoppe described. “We were butting heads, but in a good way. I would write so much stuff and say that people need to know these things, but Riley would cut it down.” Similarly, Demps depended on Hoppe’s alternate approach to problems. “I wanted to be more like ‘We will figure it all out’ and Cade said, ‘No, we need to have a paper trail.’”
Run Day
Demps attributed the strong numbers of runners and donors to the fact that regardless of whether you were a runner or not, you could make a difference. “A lot of people don’t do any type of athletics so they aren’t going to run even two miles. They could still contribute a dollar per mile and support a runner who they knew,” he explained. “The beauty of this was people had multiple methods to help, from monetarily to running to sharing the information. There were so many ways to make a tangible difference for the movement.”
By the time Sunday came around and it was time to run, they were both thankful to have gotten through all the complications of gathering information and getting all the runners ready in various parts of the country. “That was the easy part,” Hoppe said. “The difficult part was running!”
As excited as Demps was about the event, he wasn’t in the best of running shape on Sunday. “I’m no marathon runner to begin with, but I was talking big about how I was going to run 20 miles. Meanwhile, I hadn’t run at all and figured I would be fine,” he recounted. “I decided to do a little warmup run the day before and while I’m doing it, I’m talking to Cade. All of a sudden, my phone goes flying and I rolled my ankle.”
With an injured ankle, Demps figured there was no way he would complete 20 miles and he would just do what he could. “I ran eight miles and said, ‘I’m not doing this anymore,’ but people were texting me asking me if I was still running 20. My ankle said no, but my ego and the fundraising drive said I wasn’t done yet. I ended up walking the last 12 miles.”
Hoppe had never completed more than 11 miles at once before the run-a-thon. “I told my dad, I was going to aim for 20. We have a 10-mile loop in our town, which is in the foothills of Sacramento and fortunately it is pretty flat,” he communicated. “I changed my goal to 30 miles. We set up stations with energy boosters and water. I felt fine after 10 miles, but your body really starts to break down after 20. For me it was all about a physical achievement and how far I could push my body.”
The 6-foot-8-inch Hoppe met his goal of running 30 miles at the run-a-thon, nearly three times his previous best. “What we did proved a lot to ourselves, particularly for a cause that means so much to us,” he expressed. “It was the most physically exhausted I have ever been. I couldn’t walk for a couple days, but I had to go on because we were still running this big event and making sure we got all the information we needed to make sure the money was all donated properly.”
Campaign Zero and Running for a Cause
“I am a very numbers-driven guy. The numbers combined with data-driven analysis were very compelling with Campaign Zero,” Demps explained. “This was even before it had started its #8Can’tWait campaign with an action plan of reducing police brutality. One of my friends created a list of possible organizations to support and we liked Campaign Zero best.”
Hoppe’s business sense gravitated him toward Campaign Zero as well. “It is a good organization that can make a change and was one that was really easy for us to market,” he articulated. “We wanted people who are passionate about Black Lives Matter and the movement as a whole, but we also wanted people who may not know exactly where they stand. The data is out there to end police violence.”
“Campaign Zero has collected a lot of data with tests and analyses to show which policies help and which don’t help,” Demps contributed. “People like to use numbers and the numbers don’t lie.”
“A lot of organizations have been helpful and doing work around these issues for a long time,” Hoppe remarked. “If police violence is a burning building, we have been using hoses to douse the fire. Campaign Zero could potentially end burning buildings. Why just tame the fire when you can put it completely out?”
“We feel some pressure to use the momentum that is building. People really want to get involved now as so many different things contributed to the movement blowing up as it has,” Hoppe concluded. “We don’t know what our next project is yet, but we need to talk about it. We don’t want to be a one-hit wonder.”