Changemaker- Chris Raine

Chris Raine is the Founder and CEO of Hello Sunday Morning – an international health promotion charity that facilitates the program and supports thousands of people across the world to take a break from drinking and assess their own relationship with alcohol.

This week we feature Chris in Changemakers- a weekly column that examines inspiring people and their careers in the Not for Profit sector.

The focus of the organisation is to build technology that both influences individual behaviours but also changes the culture around us with an aim to expand to the UK and USA in 2014.

Hello Sunday Morning was started in 2009 after one particularly bad hangover when Chris was 22-years-old. By the end of that year the community of people committing to a three-month break from drinking had grown to 20 people. Four years later, thanks to the support of governments across Australia and New Zealand, that community now sits at over 14,000 people, with each one of their stories an essential contribution to a better drinking culture.

The Hello Sunday Morning program was awarded the 2011 Australian Government National Award for Services to Young people.

Chris has a swag of awards including Queensland Young Australian of the Year, Young Social Pioneer and is an Oxford MBA Skoll Scholarship winner.

What are you currently working on in the organisation?

At the moment we are working on a premium service for those using our technology. We find that the average savings when a person completes a HSM is over $1000, so our focus is to find a way to add value to those participants in a way that can sustain the NGO through supplementing our government contracts.

What is the best thing about working in the Not for Profit sector?

Most sectors in the community use one overriding common exchange of value – money. In our sector have this weird and wonderful existence of exchanging all these other points of value such as kindness and compassion and investing in the obscure potential of a person. As a humanist, this is right up my alley!

What do you like best about working in your current organisation? 

Hello Sunday Morning’s mission is to change the world’s relationship with alcohol. We want to be the largest and most effective technology organisation addressing this global issue over the next 20 years. It is a huge mission that very much inspires the team to greater and greater heights. I love the challenge.

Favourite saying …

“The world will break your heart 10 ways to Sunday, that’s guaranteed. And I can’t begin to explain that, or the craziness inside myself and everybody else, but guess what? Sunday is my favourite day again. I think of everything everyone did for me, and I feel like…a very lucky guy.” —Silver Linings Playbook

If you could be or do anything else, what would it be?

In the next 10 years I have this obscure goal of DJing at a major dance festival. If it wasn’t for Hello Sunday Morning, I’d probably be doing that now. However, I am a firm believer that anything is possible… so when the time is right, you’ll see me up there making a few thousand people dance!

What inspires you? Who inspires you?

As Kanye West profoundly offered, “I inspire me!”. Seriously through, I have a huge file on my computer called, ‘the Legends’, it contains dozens of faces of people who inspire me and I often go through those faces when I need a bit of a lift. My top five at the moment:

1.Ricky Gervais 2.David Gonski 3.Mark Scott 4.Russel Brand 5.Paul Keating