Hugo Inglis is a four-time Olympian with New Zealand. For over a decade, he scored goals at the very top of international elite Field Hockey. Nowadays, Hugo is a co-founder of High Impact Athletes (HIA), a global movement empowering athletes to fund the world’s most effective climate and social solutions.
Under his leadership, HIA has grown to over 220 athletes across 48 sports and 34 countries, collectively driving almost $2 million in donations, improving almost half a million lives, protecting nearly 7 million animals and mitigating more than 600,000+ tonnes of CO₂e.
Grounded in science, technology, and storytelling, Hugo is committed to turning sport’s cultural power into real-world impact.
Hugo on the elite mindset link to philanthropy:
“The Number One thing that being part of Olympic cycles and a national team brings is that you get to work with incredible people, like coaches, high performance staff, team mates, psychologists.
They all were the best at what they were doing and their job was to help us on the field when it comes to these big events and so, learning with these experts to understand what it’s like to get the most out of your ability is something that we have really taken into the philanthropic space.
So, if I want to do some good for the climate, or I want to help people, let’s find the experts who spend every waking minute working on that and let’s be guided by them and use the evidence and research that they are doing to amplify what we are going to do in the world.”
Guilt versus greatness:
“All charity starts out with a beautiful drive to want to do good in the world and so every charity is very well meaning, they do very hard work in fields that it’s needed. But I guess the aspect I often saw, was that once I gave, I didn’t often know the impact of it. So, you go to a ball or a gala or an awards night and you give some money or you go to your local supermarket and you drop some money in a bucket and that’s where the relationship kind of stops in a lot of cases.
So, for us it’s thinking about how do we build that relationship, how do we maintain it and ensure that our donors know what happens once the donation is made…where does that money go? Who has been effected? How many lives is that impacting? What was the cost for delivery of that?
It’s about going from one interaction to ‘how do we take that next step and really crystalise the impact that people are making’ and hopefully in the process make people feel really good about what they are doing.”
The HIA “Race for Impact” partnership with HYROX:
“It’s been a big departure from working with elite athletes to working with HYROX. Some of them are much better athletes than me, but the way I look at it is that we can work with an athlete who can speak to millions of people, or we can work with a sport and work with their audience to enable them to immeasurably improve the world.
The way that we want to provide a platform with race for impact is to give people the opportunity to move from an apathetic mindset of ‘there’ so much going on, it’s so hard to make an impact’ – to a state of agency where they can see that they can measurably make a difference here, by being really strategic and thoughtful about their giving.”