parkrun brings happiness and health to people of all sorts across the world.

It is excellent news that parkrun has appointed several new Trustees to its Global Board, bringing their talents and experience to bear in enhancing the charity’s capacity to fulfil its objectives.

The decision however to include former editor of The Sun newspaper and current Chief Operating Officer of News UK David Dinsmore amongst those appointments is a serious misjudgment and an affront to volunteers and ordinary runners across the UK. We call upon parkrun to reverse this appointment before the parkrun brand suffers further damage.   

In making this call this we are not standing against parkrun’s core value of inclusiveness but rather standing up for it. No one asks what you read before letting you start a parkrun. Whether it’s The Sun, The Guardian or The Beano, everyone is welcome. David Dinsmore is as welcome to participate as anyone else and we are happy that, like many another regular parkrunner, he apparently enjoys the benefits of an active, social start to his Saturday morning.

However, when your stated desire is for “as many people as possible to feel part of a real local community brought together by our events” it is poor judgement in the extreme to appoint to a leadership role a senior executive of an organisation which has consistently promoted and continues to promote values and behaviour contrary to those of the parkrun community. Misogyny, body shaming, divisiveness, and xenophobia have no place at a parkrun.

Whilst parkrun’s Board may feel they have successfully applied a rigorous recruitment process, they appear to have forgotten that the ultimate test of their decision making is not whether they have met Charity Commission rules, but whether the grass roots volunteers and runners – without whom there is no parkrun - will accept it. The signatories of this petition do not, and if this decision is not reversed many will ultimately vote, appropriately but sadly, with their feet.