John Schafer

John Schafer
Director
Ministry of Sailing

John Schafer says his time as a Harper College wide receiver in the 1980s helped prepare him for the long career in security and safety that has followed.

Schafer now runs a company called Ministry of Sailing, which provides safety and training support to major boating races across the globe, including the Race to Mackinac, which starts in Chicago. Before that, he served in the Army, led security response efforts in war zones and natural disasters, and helped establish the United Nations’ Saving Lives Together initiative.

But first, he learned to read defenses.

“Understanding the defense and looking for their vulnerabilities and exploiting them, that’s what risk management is all about,” Schafer said. “But it’s backwards in risk management. When you see the vulnerabilities, we reinforce them.”

Schafer won the Harper football team’s 1984 Team Spirit Award. He credits lessons learned on and off the field to former Harper football coach, John Eliasik, who gave his players the tools they needed to succeed, managed internal conflicts and made sure they worked as a team.

“You don’t have safety without leadership, without assessments and without teamwork,” Schafer said. “And the greatest thing I learned on that football field was teamwork.”

Teamwork was a fundamental driver of Schafer’s involvement in the creation of the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs. He has experience throughout his career in navigating hostage situations, and he knows that a lack of teamwork, communication and cooperation can cause problems.

“In the United States, when a hostage gets taken, three entities are usually involved with that. But there was no coordination between them,” Schafer said. “It was important to get a coordinating mechanism on the top level of government.”

Schafer has written three books, including the most recent Safety is Second, which focuses on safety in sailing.

“My English class was quite fun,” he said. “I wrote a lot then, so it did have some influence on me.”