Name: Building a Global Participation Movement with Paul Sinton-Hewitt
Uploaded: 2020-09-02T19:10:29.000Z
Duration: 6 min 59 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Past simple

We didn't start with a grand, all-encompassing plan for world domination.

I simply invited my friends to the park because I was a bit lonely.

I had no idea that other people's lives would be affected by this little seed that I planted.

For what started as an excuse to be with my friends at a time when I really needed them close, to have become a global phenomenon will always be extraordinary to a South African computer programmer who liked to run.

I will never be comfortable with personal accolades that I'm given.

But over time I've got used to the idea that Park Run is something special.

That this event I created mostly for my own health and happiness has become a movement that has had such a positive impact on so many people's lives.

It's not uncommon for someone to tell me that Park run for them has been the difference between living and dying literally.But I have not done this alone.

I would not be here tonight without the contribution off countless others.

At the heart of my story and of Park Run's story is something that I firmly believe in: that people are good

Time and time again over the last 15 years, I've been overwhelmed by the powerful displays of the human spirit, as people have come together on Saturday and Sunday mornings, sharing our wonderful parks and open spaces and being active together.

I was going through a difficult time in my life, and running was the constant that kept my head above water.

And suddenly, thanks to an injury, I couldn't do it anymore.

What I knew in 2004 was that I personally had a need to be active, to be outdoors and to be social.

What I didn't know was that so did everybody else.

Like most great things in life, Park Run is a very simple, concept.

Free, weekly community-led, socially focused events where you can walk, jog, run, volunteer or spectate.

We used the timed run as a hook to get people involved, but it was never really about that.

Absolutely anyone is welcome to participate in some way, and it's not unusual to see four generations of the same family all taking part on the same day.

Park Run brings people together in a way too often overlooked by modern society and in a way that empowers the most wonderful aspects of the human spirit.

It offers everyone the opportunity to involve themselves in something positive, constructive and joyful; to be part of their community, and to contribute to the health and happiness of their fellow humans.

In an ever more frantic and lonely world, thousands of families every week use their local Park Run to spend time together, leaving the stresses of everyday life behind and reconnecting with loved ones.

And all of this happens every single week in a park local to you.

From what started out 15 years ago as 18 friends met (meeting) in a park--13 runners and five volunteers--we expect that by the end of this year, over four million different people will have walked, jogged, run or volunteered over 60 million times at 2000 parks and open spaces across 21 countries.

It was several years ago when I realized that in order to achieve our dream, we would need to become a single global family bound together by a common desire to make the world healthy and happier.

Importantly, also at that time I realized that our wonderful community had outgrown my capabilities and if we were going to succeed, we would need the leadership of someone with an exceptional balance of skills and experience.

When in May 2015 I appointed Nick Pearson as our CEO, I removed myself from the day-to-day running of the organization.

This was possibly the most challenging moment of my life, as Park Run was only 11 years old and it felt like my own child.

This thing that I had nurtured for 11 years, seen grow up through good times and bad needed to take the next steps.

I found a desperately hard to accept that Park Run could and should run without me.

But the more and more I thought about it, the more I realized it was the only option.

Today we have 43 staff all around the world, still an incredibly small team, given the level of impact that the Park Run delivers and a team that I'm immensely proud to call colleagues and friends.

But it's no longer me that leads that team.

Great movements on trajectories to change the world are so often brought down by their founders, who hang on too long, suffocating the spirit of their creation.

In my case, I recognized that the skill set I possessed, which was so critical to creating Park Run and guiding it through the turbulent times of our first 10 years, was not the same skill set required to match the completely different set of challenges faced by a global movement with many millions of members.

Under Nick's leadership, Park Run has achieved so many of my dreams in ways I could never have imagined, and it's wonderful to speak to fellow park runners.

People always want to thank me and say, Park Run did this Park Run and improved my health, Park Run helped me find friends or feel part of a community, and that's wonderful.

But really, they did it; every decision they made, they took themselves.

As I've already said, and at the heart of my story and of Park Run's story, there is something that I firmly believe in: people are good.