Runningstories #14

06 June 2025

Imagining together ways to suggest systemic change

This episode is the recording of Runforever’s AGM on 6^th June 2025. After a brief introduction about the recent developments at HMPG, Runforever CEO Paolo Maccagno opens a question about the future of Runforever asking perspectives from trustees and friends. It seems the time to share the experience and knowledge from Runforever’s work with the wider community to challenge cultural assumption and mindset about “punishment” that affects all our society.

The conversation is an example of “imagining together” where some fundamental ideas emerged in relation to third sector organisations, on the importance of downsizing expectations when working with big institutions, about the risk of burnout and the need of taking care of oneself and on the idea of future workshops as a way to be “brutally honest” in this moment of general collapse. This conversation reinforced the awareness that working for the “useless” is crucial for being human.

Participants into the conversation are trustees, members and friends of Runforever: Paolo Maccagno (CEO Runforever), Mark Hope (Chair Runforever), Sara Genny Rizzo Parisi (Secretary Runforever), Fiona Hope (Treasurer Runforever), Pedro Montero Gosálbez (Trustee Runforever), Emilia Ferraro (Trustee Runforever), Silvia Casini (Trustee Runforever), Uchekhukwu Osondu (Member Runforever) and Jane Russell (ACVO- Aberdeen).

0:00 Runningstories show trailer

0:30 Paolo Maccagno: What do we do now? Is it worth being patient or should we also be aware of the risk of becoming complicit in something we would like to change?

1:20 Pedro Montero: about his experience in architecture and a free school in Germany. Having time for reflections and discussions for becoming aware of what we are doing and consider this as fundamental part of what we do.

4:20 Paolo Maccagno: Dedicate time for awareness and imagine a series of workshops involving the wider communities.

7:00 Jane Russell (ACVO): sharing experience from contemporary issues in the third sector and the importance of working in the health and wellbeing sector to help the marginals. Runforever is actually phenomenal for what you have done in the last two years considering the difficult times. Health and wellbeing need to include the criminal justice and this is what you are doing especially with your emphasis on community building. Change is happening and it’s important to build a critical mass. “Put people first” is the recent motto from NHS Grampian.

16:45 Silvia Casini: Be proud of what you have accomplished in just two years. If you stop doing what you are doing, the first to suffer are prisoners. We need to stay within the system and running workshops could be a good idea to let the community know about Runforever’s work. From her academic experience Silvia suggests to document the work of Runforever and maybe involve students from the Health and Humanities programme – Aberdeen University.

22:40 Emilia Ferraro: if we want to change the system, we need to work not just in the prison but also more generally in the health and wellbeing context in society. What we need to address is the cultural assumption and mindset about “punishment” that affects all our society and that it is magnified in the prison. There is no complicit if there is awareness.

28:45 Uche Osondu: Everything is different but everything is the same. Why not including prisoners in the workshops? It would be good to invite people to be part of the same “emotional limbo” independently from their different social identity. Everything is different but everything is the same. Back home (in Nigeria) things are changing. If the system makes you feel that you are an accomplice, it is helpful because then we know where to start from.

34:45 Sara Jenny Rizzo Parisi: “You know that you can’t change anything”. This is not negative but awareness. Reference to Werner Herzog and the “conqueror of the useless”. You have to know you will fail which doesn’t mean that it is not worth doing what Runforever does.

36:40 Paolo Maccagno: The sense of honesty with ourselves is fundamental so we have to know that we are working for the “useless”. Self-celebrating ourselves is not useful after a while. Trying to work on systemic change needs to downsize our ambition and be humble. Probably it also needs knowing that it is “useless” in a positive sense.

38:40 Pedro Montero: We need to ask a good question. Systemic change is not so much about problem solving. If we are just questioning or just answering how to change the forms of our system but without being critical about the dynamics that constitute those forms, the answers we will be giving will probably reinforce those forms.

39:40 Silvia Casini: Where are my limits? How can I not have a mental breakdown? The frustration of belonging to process of systemic change. It’s important to ask the question, how can we take care of ourselves? This is a general problem from anyone working on similar paths within organisations or institutions who are trying to maintain awareness.

41:50 Paolo Maccagno: Many people working in the third sector suffers from being burnout. This is a huge paradox. If we are trying to bring something new to the world (out of the business mindset), we should not burnout. Knowing that many are burnout, makes me ask the question about being an accomplice because this is the way the system can coopt us through logics of sacrifice and hard work. Why not a workshop to take care of ourselves? To be burnout is a failure I would not like to suffer. I’m happy to fail but with joy.

44:45 Mark Hope: workshops are important. We need to propose them as a way to be “brutally honest”. In this moment of general collapse, I notice a lack of honesty and transparency and respect. The only way to respect another human being is to listen carefully to the other. We should set up workshops enabling that possibility and being prepared to fail and admit that something is totally dysfunctional. To do this we need to be brutally honest and being able to be vulnerable. This would be incredibly important if prisoners could see senior staff and prison staff being open about this.

48:00 Fiona Hope: There is enough experience in Runforever now to share with the wider society. We are just back from a Tich Naht Han retreat. In that tradition there is a practice of sitting in a circle, the “circle sharing groups” where there is always a pause between people talking. There is silence in between. Everybody feels that is so important in order to be really heard without being challenged or responded to. That kind of sharing might be a good example for the workshops.

51:20 Paolo Maccagno: The practice of sitting in a circle is what we are doing with the “Around the fire” practice in the prison and in other contexts. This makes us think that the modality for the workshops we are imagining is very important. Take people out of their ordinary life to talk differently. As environmental philosopher David Abram says, “It is not those who argue well who are going to change the world but it’s those who speak differently” (see this video at minute 2’40). There is a new group of prisoners, emerging spontaneously at HMPG and very knowledgeable about health. It would be good to help this group to flourish and grow and maybe the workshops might be a way to bring attention on it. Our work is to coordinate these kinds of energies. We are not “delivering”, we are learning together…