Glen's Story

Choice, Connection and Creation

Glen Ford is the founder of Champions, a movement centring leadership on what makes us human.

It began in 2004, volunteering on the building of the Kigali Genocide Memorial, the resting place of more than 250,000 innocent victims.

Over the next 20 years he supported the survivors’ vision: healing their people and teaching their children what it means to live peacefully. Today, 2.5 million Rwandan children learn peace education every year.

He now brings what he learned to workplaces, colleges and schools through the Champions movement.

Today, Glen lives in the UK. He is married, with four daughters and five grandchildren. He enjoys baking bread, making cheese, photography, meeting new people and discovering new places. Most of all, he enjoys supporting others to be the best versions of themselves.

Introduction

Glen’s story begins not with a grand plan, but with a series of choices — some made in youth, some in uncertainty, and some in response to moments that changed the course of his life.

He founded the Champions Movement in March 2025. His purpose is simple: to take what he learned in Rwanda to the wider world.

This follows a 40+ year career, including 20 years in the UK road-building industry and 22 years of service and leadership alongside Rwandans, supporting their journey of reconciliation, recovery and rebuilding.

Early Influences

Glen was born in London in 1967 and grew up with an early awareness that life is shaped by both hardship and moral courage.

But first, there was a near tragedy. At four, his family home caught fire in the middle of the night. He survived because his mother threw him from an upstairs window and, remarkably, a neighbour caught him before he hit the concrete below.

His right hand still carries scars from that night, burnt as the young boy passed the flames. Perhaps it left an early lesson: life can be short, we only get one round, and sometimes we need someone to catch us.

His father, Norman, was born and raised in India as part of the Anglo-Indian community and came to Britain after Partition. While supervising the unloading of ships in India, Norman once refused to allow a man to be excluded because of the colour of his skin. He was known as someone who could be trusted.

His mother, Valerie, showed a different kind of courage. She fell in love with this “tall, dark, handsome” man. Despite the prejudice of 1950s London, including within her own family, she chose love over prejudice.

And so, Glen came into the world.

Much of his education was spent at a boarding school on the south coast of England. Not quite Harry Potter, but close in some ways — historic buildings, dormitories and the like. For his later school years, he moved to Cambridge.

It was there that he found faith. A local Baptist church had recently started a youth group led by the vicar’s son, Andrew Cave. New to Cambridge, Glen joined as a way to meet people. He and Andrew have remained friends ever since, with Andrew becoming an established author and recently joining Glen on a Champions trip to Chicago.

Faith became an important part of Glen’s life. He also developed lifelong friendships with people of other faiths and those of none, reinforcing his belief in the value of simple humanity.

After school, he joined Tarmac, the UK’s largest road-building company, at 17 as a trainee manager.

Tarmac sent him to college, combining study with work experience. At Christmas 1986, aged 19, he and Janet became engaged. The following year, a few months after turning 20, he left college and started full-time work. Glen and Janet married in July 1987 and became a family together the following month.

Janet was a few years older and had two young daughters from a previous marriage, Gina and Dinah, then aged seven and six. They were a ready-made family.

It was a lot of responsibility at a young age.

Recognising this, Glen reached out to Marina Smith, a Methodist minister’s wife and religious education teacher. She and her family ran a small counselling retreat in rural Nottinghamshire. Marina became a mentor to Glen and his family, and that connection would quietly shape everything that followed.

Lessons from the Quarry

Glen spent three years learning the road-building trade, earning an HND in Quarrying and Road Engineering, followed by ten years managing quarries and asphalt plants across southern England.

It taught him how to relate to people and lead teams — and why good management matters. People can get killed in quarries when management fails.

In his early twenties, Glen managed a limestone quarry where a workplace fatality had occurred a few years before his arrival.

He made safety his personal business.

In 1992, around 18 months after he took charge, the quarry won a national safety award — the first Tarmac site to receive a national award for excellence in safety management.

He was 25.

Around the same time, the local planning authority threatened to close the quarry over a compliance issue, giving it six months to comply or close.

But compliance — ticking the boxes — would not win the local community. Glen chose to engage.

He opened the quarry to local schoolchildren, their parents and the wider public, leading the tours himself. One summer, a couple told him they had chosen the area for their holiday because of the quarry visits.

More than 30 years later, the quarry still operates and has secured permission from the local community to remain for a further 30 years.

The lesson stayed with him: when people are seen and brought closer, fear can turn into trust.

From Quarry to Boardroom

While running the quarry, Glen completed a part-time MBA at Bournemouth University from 1994 to 1997.

In 1998, he went from managing a small quarry to working as a business analyst for the CFO of Tarmac plc.

At 30, he was the “old man” of a team of young accountants and analysts. But he brought something different: years of experience on the ground.

After Anglo American acquired Tarmac, he became Development Manager for its building products division, a £300 million-a-year business employing 2,000 people.

Reporting to the divisional managing director, he helped shape strategy across four business units and led acquisitions from valuation through to competition approval.

Rwanda

Years earlier, Marina’s sons, Stephen and James Smith, had transformed her retreat into Beth Shalom, now the UK National Holocaust Centre and Museum.

It opened in 1995 as a place where Holocaust survivors found dignity, love and a voice. Through the Aegis Trust, formed in 1999, that work reached Rwanda. Glen joined as a trustee of both organisations in late 2003.

In early 2004, ten years after the genocide against the Tutsi, Glen travelled to Kigali as a volunteer to help build the Kigali Genocide Memorial, which opened that April.

It is the final resting place of more than 250,000 innocent victims.

There he saw both the depths of inhumanity and the extraordinary resilience of survivors. He saw that hatred is not abstract: it is learned, normalised and acted upon by ordinary people.

He also saw something else: healing, empathy and responsibility can be learned and practised too.

In May 2004, Marina asked him to stay involved, but challenged him to choose. He could not fully pursue his corporate career and this emerging mission at the same time.

It was a big choice.

Glen had built a 20-year career with a major corporation, with a pension, share options, company car and the security that came with it. He was well trained and experienced in operations, finance and strategy.

He was also the family's sole breadwinner. Glen and Janet had two more daughters, Emily and Abigail, then aged 16 and 11.

But in Glen’s mind there was only one path. His trust in Marina, built over 20 years, gave him the courage to take the leap.

In his mid-thirties, he walked away from corporate security. He and Janet had also recently sold their home, given some of the proceeds to support the work in Rwanda, and were living in rented accommodation.

As his friend and colleague Freddy at the Memorial later put it:

“He was so moved by what he experienced that he gave up his career and walked this path with us, with survivors and the team at the Memorial.”

Years of Creation

To earn a living while remaining free to volunteer, Glen established a management consultancy with a former Tarmac colleague. He also became a professional photographer, photographing some 300 weddings over the next eight years.

He served as a trustee of the National Holocaust Centre until 2010 and of the Aegis Trust until 2013.

He helped establish The Journey exhibition at the Centre. When the 2009 financial crash threatened the museum’s future, he stepped in as interim director that summer and worked with the senior team to put both organisations on a viable path.

In 2012, Glen moved to Kigali as Managing Director of Aegis, tasked with securing major funding to expand its peace education work in Rwanda. That funding reached some $30 million over the following decade — ten times the previous level.

The work helped break cycles of hatred and extend the Kigali Genocide Memorial, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Memorial’s peace education programme was adopted across Rwanda's education system and now reaches 2.5 million children every year.

From 2013 to 2023, as Director of International Development, Glen built support for Aegis in the US and Australia.

In 2014–15, he secured $10 million for violence-prevention programmes in Kenya’s Rift Valley, South Sudan and the Central African Republic. In Kenya, the 2015 Walk for Peace initiative helped bring peace to communities across a region of some 10 million people.

Stories were used to strengthen empathy, critical thinking and personal responsibility. Research later showed their potential to support mental health and healing too.

In 2018, Glen created special visits to the Kigali Genocide Memorial for international business groups, using a social enterprise model to carry its lessons to people from around the world.

He also supported enterprise teams that grew from the Aegis Trust, including the White Rose shops in the UK and visitor services and social enterprises in Rwanda, including Good Human Coffee.

Why Champions

Having stood down from Aegis in early 2025, Glen founded Champions as a humanity-centred leadership and education movement.

Across four decades — from quarries and boardrooms to genocide prevention and peace education — one lesson kept returning: people matter.

How we choose to act matters. The relationships we build matter. And what we create together can reach far beyond us.

Looking back, the Champions Pathway — Choice, Connection and Creation — was already there.

A choice took Glen to Rwanda.

Connection gave that choice meaning.

And together with many extraordinary people, those connections created possibilities he could never have imagined when he first arrived in Kigali as a volunteer in 2004.

Champions is the next chapter.

Above all, Glen's journey has left him grateful for the people he has met, the stories entrusted to him, and the simple truth at the heart of Champions:

The future has not happened yet. What we do next matters.

Below: a few pictures.

And below are short videos of Glen speaking at a Young Presidents Organization event in New York, September 2023 — with fellow panelist Dr Denise Garcia from Northeastern University, Boston.

And below, Glen gives an interview in 2024 on his journey to Rwanda