From Strategy to Practice
It’s been another inspiring week in Participate World.
My week started on Sunday as I drove down to Bristol, before spending Monday with Mel Bound and Georgie Freeman talking all things This Woman Runs, a brilliant movement (founded and led by Mel) that supports women’s running across the UK. Over the last 12 months we’ve worked together refining their operating processes with the aim of scaling their impact.
On Tuesday, Chris Lomax MBE and I retreated to my kitchen for a strategy / whiteboard day, as we dedicated some time to focus on the business side of our business. It’s easy to fill your days speaking to great people and imagining how you’re going to change the world, but even as a highly mission-driven organisation if we don’t create a financially successful model we’ll not be able to do what we want to do. For us, as with so many businesses, we need to get better at prioritising our time, spreading ourselves a little less thin, and focussing on the right things.
Later in the week, Chris popped down to the University of Leeds, where J Simon Rofe invited him to contribute to a post graduate session on what diplomatic negotiation looks like in practice. Chris talked the students through his work to create a UN investigation into gross violations and abuses of human rights in South Sudan. Although, in many ways, that sounds about as far from community sport as you could get, getting people together to be outdoors, active, and social is an incredibly powerful tool for social cohesion community building. And so perhaps if there’s more of that in the world then there might be less of the bad stuff.
Whilst Chris was saving the world with Simon and his students, I was back in community sport land catching up with Cathi Farrer-Mitchell as she and her team look toward this year’s Park Yoga season. If parkrun was yoga this would be it, so if you want to improve your own health and wellbeing then do check out their website and see if there’s a group near you.
Finally, we just wanted to send our thoughts to all our friends across the Middle East. It’s not a part of the world that either of us had much experience of prior to the last 12 months, but since we started working together we’ve been lucky enough to spend time in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. During that time we’ve built some wonderful friendships, and connected with a whole load of brilliant people, both expats and locals. Whilst what we see in the news often isn’t reflective of reality, and to some extent that’s the case right now, it’s clearly a difficult time and we really hope that calm is restored sooner rather than later.
📸 This week’s image is of the utterly brilliant Peak Health Coaching podcast with Ollie Hart & Tim Williams. I was lucky enough to be this week’s guest, talking all things parkrun, and community sport. Please do give it a listen, subscribe, and share their work far and wide.
