We immerse ourselves with the communities and work with them to create sustainable programs that will assit them to build new economies in their communities. We prefer this approach instead of giving out support in monetary terms.

Besides this, Runners Wild also creates educational programs with the schools in each community, with the hope to enrich the experiences of the students there. We work closely with the teachers and the principals of each school to develop each program.

Our community programs also benefit from the tireless work from volunteers, who help by contributing their time and knowledge of the various segments of our programs. These include, teachers, trail runners, journalists, doctors and members of the communities.

The community initiatives that we have run in Bario and now in Ladakh are as follows:

We work with volunteers from the local community who are keen to take on the responsibility to be a part of our team. From here on, our technical race team will work with the ground team as one, to plan, organize, mobilise the manpower and run the race. With this training over a few years, we hope that the local community will have enough expertise within themselves, to create other events with the necessary event management skills picked up, while organizing our trail run.

We developed a new tourism website for Bario with updated information as s gateway for first time travelelrs to Bario. This also included a Facebook page. Since the internet bandwith was slow in Bario, the content and pictures were taken, written and uploaded by volunteers based in Kuala Lumpur.

We would give workshops to the respective communities to show them the impact of what the outside world would be able to experience of Bario and also more importantly the impact of ratings and comments on the services and hospitality that would potray those relying on tourism such as Homestay owners and guides.

This website has since been taken down, as we could not find any qualified volunteers to take over this platform.

Bario was mainly visited by visitors from Europe and Australia. Oddly enough, this beautiful land was somehow missed out by many Malaysians and Singaporeans. With this in mind, we embarked on a strategy to promote and market Bario to the adventurous trail runners in South East Asia. The central location of the beauty of Bario to many South East Asian countries would entice tourists to Bario and it’s surrounding villages.

This program is close to our hearts as we work with a core group of youngsters from Bario Secondary School to teach them the joys of writing and engagement. This included photography and writing workshops and basic journalism training that were conducted by our volunteers.

The program also included an exchange program with a school from Hong Kong where the kids from Hong Kong visited Bario and spent time there with the Bario students acting as their hosts and guides to their land.

We currently are working with the Druk White Lotus School in Ladakh, India, where we are creating online cultural exchange programs with schools in Singapore and other parts of Asia.

Contributing to the local economy. For the event’s needs, we try to source as much as we can from the local community. This includes Finisher medals and bracelets and rental of communications equipment.

We repaired bridges or maintained sections of trails that were part of our run to ensure that there was connectivity between the more isolated villages. This was to encourage tourists to hike out and experience these communities located closer to the mountains.

We are currently working with youth groups and the Druk White Lotus school in the Himalayan state of Ladakh in India. We are setting the groundwork for a future event. With the pandemic this will not have a certain fixed date but we are taking the time to work on cultural exchange programs and some future tourism programs with volunteers on the ground there.