We can make a difference at events like this
By Charlotte Chambers:
A few weeks ago, I woke up way too early for my liking, chugged an energy drink, and quickly left my house. Normally, I’d be annoyed doing this, but I was restless as I was going to another WTF event.
Let me quickly catch you up to speed.
Months prior we had done a charity take over at the local and beautiful Shipley Park during their weekly Parkrun. Despite it being only a stone’s throw away from the charity’s base and many of the volunteers being deeply involved with this Parkrun, this was completely new territory for us as a charity. Our last pop up was easily one of the best events we’d ever attended. We didn’t have the usual comfort of our stand. It was just us, our green t-shirts, and hundreds of runners. But we still managed to marshal the run with only a few mishaps on the way.
The success of this event made us eager to do it again. As a regular attender of the events meetings, I can tell you that Parkrun quickly became an agenda point every single meeting until I almost became bored of hearing about it. It just shows how excited we all were to get a spot there again.
We pulled some strings (it always helps when your mum is the junior parkrun coordinator!) and got ourselves another charity take over.
So that brings you to the morning of the run. Our chair followed up the head marshall’s speech with an intro to us and our work. I have never heard a crowd of runners go so quiet before a race. Last time, we had marshalled the run, leaving only a few volunteers at the end. This time, we had changed our strategy, using Parkrun volunteers as marshalls so that we could have all of our volunteers based at the finish line. This worked wonders, allowing us to say well done to almost all of the runners that passed. We also had so many incredible conversations about mental health, suicide, and our work.
Local events like this are truly incredible experiences. They allow for us as a charity to attend a rigorously organised event without taking our focus away from why we are really here: to spread awareness and resources so that less people take their life. At our events, our focus is often logistics and it means we get to spend less time doing what matters to us.
I hope that this is the start of a strong relationship with Parkrun and that we can attend many more of their runs in the future!
