Looking back, looking forward

I’ll be honest, it’s been a bit of an odd few days for me at Participate World Towers.

After a wonderful couple of weeks leave, largely decompressing at home, visiting my Mum and Helen’s Aunty (not the same person, that wouldn’t work), and enjoying watching Harrogate Town get off to a cracking start of the League Two season, it was great to be back.

With Monday being a public holiday though, the working week didn’t start until Tuesday, and then by Wednesday afternoon I’d come down with some kind of cold / flu / covid thing and found myself back in bed and snoozing by 4pm.

So, somewhat of a false start.

Anyway, during the day-and-a-half I was around, we did manage a wonderful first meeting with Yianny Ioannou from Tackle Africa, alongside Jason Morgan MBE from Charlton Athletic Community Trust. I also caught up with my good friend and long-term global collaborator Ian Slonim CA (SA), FCMA from Vitality, and later got to hear all about the great work that Purposeful Ventures are embarking on, thanks to 45 minutes with the brilliant Courtney Gainer.

And so here we are, three o’clock on Friday afternoon, I’m halfway recovered, and hoping for a fun weekend, before jetting off to Abu Dhabi first thing Monday morning to catch up with Ross Baxter and my colleagues at the Department for Community Development.

Finally, in just over two weeks we'll be co-hosting our first ever Community Sport for Development and Diplomacy Summit, thanks to Chris Lomax MBE, J Simon Rofe, and Dr Jo Clarke's incredible vision and hard work. As part of that I'm hoping to take a few delegates to the site of this week's photo, which is of the first ever Woodhouse Moor parkrun on October the 6th, 2007.

We've come a long way.