One message

New start

Chris: “Sports diplomacy consultancy?”

Tom: “Let’s go!”

Our organisation started with a WhatsApp message.

With very different professional backgrounds and networks, we wondered what would happen if we united 30 years of sporting excellence with 20 years of diplomatic foreign policy experience?

It felt instantly inspiring. We felt that sport, rooted in and for the benefit of communities, could make the world a better place.

It is key to health, to happiness and to societal cohesion.

We also saw that in a politically fragmented world with multiple competing crises, sport offers a tangible space in which to build local and global community.

Celebrate what’s out there.

Learn from it.

Connect it.

We have distilled Tom’s leadership experience from over 17 years at parkrun, growing the organisation from four events in one country to 2,500 in over 20, with 400,000 weekly participants and over 100m recorded instances of participation.

We have re-imaged what it means to participate in sporting events, with volunteers at the heart of active participation. This means re-designing the core principles behind effective and efficient event management. Quite often engineering in more people, to create more friction and more time that leads to more people interactions that result in better health and community outcomes.

We will always contribute to and learn from others.

We will always work for positive, people-centred impact above all else.

  • We are a consultancy registered as a private limited company in England and Wales.

  • We believe that we are uniquely placed to offer practical advice on how to establish and run community sporting events whilst also understanding how these can be scaled to national, regional and global levels for maximum participation and for global good.

  • We would be happy to discuss further. Please email us at: contact@participateworld.org