Jamie Schou Created Send It for Young Adults with Cancer. His Sisters are Carrying His Vision to the World.

Finding healing in the outdoors

At 33, Jamie Schou was diagnosed with Synovial Sarcoma, a rare and aggressive cancer. In the middle of treatments that left him feeling sick and fatigued, he was determined to find relief in nature. An avid skier, Schou had been living in Truckee, Nevada, since he graduated from college and he lived for powder days on the hills with his friends.

A year into his diagnosis, Schou wanted to do something more meaningful to both live his life fully with whatever time he had left, and help others in his age group experiencing similar health challenges to get outside and still enjoy the activities they loved while they were pushing through difficult times.

“When he was going through treatment, being outdoors was the light at the end of the tunnel,” says his sister Katie Schou. “It was what he was fighting for: to stay alive to have adventures outdoors. He was very committed and deliberate about how to spend his time.”

Jamie registered for a 501c3 designation, started putting together a board, created a logo, and started selling t-shirts for his mission. He decided to call it Send It.

“Send It is an expression; it’s a slang term from the outdoor sporting community,” Katie says. “’Just Send It!’ means give it your all. So it was something we’d say in our normal life that shifted to his cancer fight. We’d cheer him on during his treatments with ‘Yeah, send it! You can do this!’”

For Schou, ‘Send It’ became his mantra. With every break in treatment, he skied, biked, paddled, summited Half Dome, and jumped out of airplanes to keep himself positive and happy. He knew he’d have three days of feeling terrible during chemo and then he would have a few days of feeling great, so he scheduled his activities around that cadence.

Not long after he started selling Send It apparel, he created the Sent It Foundation, a non-profit providing outdoor adventures for young adults battling cancer.

Schou knew that his prognosis was grim. There wasn’t a proven treatment protocol for this particular kind of cancer and he grabbed onto the feeling of being alive when so much had been taken away from him. He endured countless hours of chemotherapy, radiation and surgery. What started as a tumor in his back spread to become over 30 tumors in his lungs. Every day; every moment was precious.

Send It’s first adventure

Jamie passed away July 12, 2014, and his sisters didn’t want Send It to die with him. So Katie quit her job as a management consultant and Caroline joined her to help other people see what their brother had figured out: live hard, love hard, play hard, and that sometimes, waiting for “someday” is not an option.

In 2015, Send It hosted its first adventure with seven participants join us for a mountain biking trip in Lake Tahoe and it has been growing ever since.

All programs are free for participants; Send It funds everything, including airfare, food, supplies, and medical staff. Send It participants vary in their state of treatment: some are in active treatment, some in remission, and some are terminal. Programs are first-come, first-served and include skiing, surfing, mountain climbing, rock climbing, and backpacking for adults 21-40.

According to the American Cancer Society, more than 60,000 young adults aged 20 to 39 are diagnosed with cancer each year in the United States. Only about 4 percent of all cancers are diagnosed in people in this age range, creating an isolating, lonely experience for those in the middle of it.

“Your life stops,” explains one participant. “Your friends, family and colleagues, they go on and continue their lives.”

During the program, every night after dinner the group gathers for a form of unplanned therapy to share their fears and issues fighting cancer in a peer group that truly gets it. Katie and the team keep the group small to stay attentive to individual needs.

“We stay together in a big house on every trip,” says Katie. “The real connection and supportive conversations happen around the fire after dinner, or over coffee, or going to sleep at night. Bringing some of those conversations forward really helps these young people.”

Jamie’s Titan: “It’s the only thing we had left of our brother”

Last fall, Katie and Caroline attended an event called Outpost Trade in Mendocino, California. Outpost Trade is a series of events designed to disrupt the conference model in the outdoor lifestyle space; networking is a key focus. Katie had heard about it just a few weeks before the event and she reached out to see it Outpost Trade had any nonprofit partners. The organizers offered Send It a table to share information about the program, and the sisters made a number of connections there.

While at the event, they met Wendy Orthman and Kevin Raftery from Nissan USA. Katie told them the story of their brother’s truck, a 2006 Nissan Titan that Send It used as its official “adventuremobile”.

“This truck was Jamie’s first new vehicle, and he was so proud of it,” Katie remembers. “He was 6’8” and needed something that would be comfortable for him, and he loved it.”

After more than a decade of use, however, the truck was aging. It had more than 200,000 miles on it and it required more than $5k in repairs and updates. Katie and Caroline didn’t want to let it go; it was the only tangible item they had left of their brother.

Nissan’s Calling All Titans movement celebrates its truck owners and the ways those people give back to the community, and it made sense to Orthman and Raftery to support Send It with a gift of repairs at a local dealership to get the truck back into shape. It makes a world of difference to them, Katie says.

“My stepkids sometimes they ask me about my Send It trips, and I tell them that I help sick people to connect and make friends with other sick people so they have someone to talk to about it,” Katie says. “They kind of get it but even so, at some point they’ll grow up and realize what we’ve been doing. They talk about Jamie all the time even though they never met him. They see the truck and say, “Oh, that’s Uncle Jamie’s!’”

Moving forward to honor Send It’s legacy

Katie wants to keep building Send It and honoring her brother’s legacy while building her own.

“I’m blown away by how much Send It has grown over the last couple of years,” she says. “Sometimes I get a little bogged down and then we run a trip and I leave so fulfilled and proud. I see people crippled with fear about rappelling down the rock wall and they do it and they’re so stoked. They get from this scared, lonely place to a stronger, ‘I can do it’ place. We’re making a difference in people’s lives.

“Send It is all about doing all the things you want to do… say the things you want to say… love the ones you want to love. Jamie felt a deep, deep gratitude for his life and he wondered why he hadn’t been living this way forever. That was the message he wanted to share.

We want to create experiences that create empowerment. It creates a sense of community and support.

For me, this came at a time when I was personally starting to question what I’d do next. I didn’t know where my career was headed and his became the gift Jamie left for me. I was a management consultant for a boutique firm – got my MBA in sustainable management. I knew it wasn’t my forever.

We’re at a growth point right now – we’re 4 years into trips and a growing community of alums. Our alumni come back and volunteer and we have an alumni trip every year. We also have a big wait list and it’s our mission to fill that need. And yet, we’re a small, family-run organization. It’s my sister and I running this, and it’s a connected experience.

Trying to find ways to grow without losing our value. Alumni are starting to join us as volunteers and staff and even leading trips. We also put people together so they have support in their area.

Phase 2: growing Send It to the next level to reach more young adults

Send It’s next goal is to create a podcast to drive conversation and peer support.

“Send It participants go home feeling that they’re not alone. They have someone to call when nobody else gets it.”

Alumni of the program join the trips as support volunteers now and they’re starting to lead trips of their own. Send It joins together those dealing with cancer so they have support in their local area, even if they can’t join a trip. It’s a movement of connection that Katie believes firmly that her brother can see, even now.

“Jamie was an incredibly kind, gentle human. He was dealt a terrible hand and never once complained. He felt like if anyone was going to beat it, it was going to be him. He wrote in his journal that he was going to beat it and win every day. I think he would say, ‘Kates, you’re doing it! You’re sending it.’”