Jacky Youldon: Why Running Side by Side Makes Hard Conversations Easier

⚠️ A note before you read: this piece includes an open conversation about suicide, including our guest's own experience as a survivor. If any of this feels close to home, please look after yourself while reading.

Samaritans are free and confidential, and you can reach them day or night on 116 123 (samaritans.org).

RunningSpace costs about £3,000 for every life-saving conversation it has. Compare that to the economic research Samaritans has done putting the cost of a single suicide at £1.46 million, and the maths behind RunningSpace starts to look less like a nice idea and more like one of the better-value interventions in public health.

Jacky Youldon is the founder of RunningSpace, a suicide-prevention project of the Pelham CIO based in Bexhill, East Sussex. The charity exists, in her words, "to champion life and beat suicide," and it does that by teaching people to run together. Running itself isn't the point. It's the platform for building three things the World Health Organization identifies as protective against suicide: faith, resilience and relationship.

RunningSpace doesn't replace clinical services or operate as a crisis line. It works upstream of both, building the community-level protective factors that reduce risk before someone reaches a crisis point.

Jacky started it after surviving her own suicide attempt and a period of hospitalisation. Looking for purpose and struggling with her mental health, she was asked at a party whether she'd teach people to run. She said no. Two days later she posted on Facebook anyway. Six people showed up to the first session. Fifteen came the following week. By April there were thirty, and the group has grown and grown.

Since then Jacky has trained formally in suicide awareness and prevention, including SafeTalk training, and reads widely in the field. She points to a model from Edwin Shneidman, sometimes called the father of modern suicidology: risk builds when unbearable emotional pain, or "psychache," combines with isolation and black-and-white thinking, the sense of being trapped with no way out. RunningSpace's training teaches volunteers to notice those signs and ask directly: "Are you thinking about suicide?"

That question is central to how Jacky frames the whole project. Rather than treating warning signs as red flags, RunningSpace calls them invitations. Asking the question directly, she says, is almost always met with relief, not offence, because it shows someone has noticed.

The numbers from the last year alone: 300 people came through RunningSpace sessions, and at least 20 life-saving conversations happened, meaning volunteers asked the direct question and the answer was yes, followed by getting that person help. On a charity turnover of £60,000 a year, that works out to roughly £3,000 per life saved, against Samaritans' £1.46 million per-suicide cost estimate. Drawing on research suggesting around 135 people are directly affected by each suicide, Jacky estimates the charity's work this year alone has spared around 2,700 people that loss.

The model relies on volunteer run leaders, most of whom have lived experience of suicide or care deeply about the issue, mentored through England Athletics training. They're not clinicians or counsellors. Their job is simpler: show up, run alongside someone, and let the running do what running does. Sessions are embedded in existing community hubs rather than run in isolation, so people build ongoing relationships and access to other local support (a job centre, debt advice and volunteering opportunities all sit inside RunningSpace's home hub in Bexhill) rather than a single hour that ends when the run does.

Jacky's spoke was 'Policies', and her answer cut straight to the tension of running a safety-critical charity. "We have policies. We love policies. But once we start to put policy above people, we are missing a trick. We're becoming legalistic, and we're missing what the policy is built for." She points to an example from a conversation with someone at Mars, the confectionery company, whose internal policies weren't built for a bereavement by suicide inside the organisation, so the team set the policy aside and listened to the person instead. For Jacky, that's the whole principle: policies exist for safety, but the person in front of you always comes first.

She closed the conversation by reading from a Christmas card sent by a participant who had been hospitalised for nine months after multiple suicide attempts before finding RunningSpace, and who was, by the time she wrote it, close to two years free of attempts: "I don't know where to start. Thank you doesn't seem enough. You saved my life, your kindness, your belief in me when no one else had any."

RunningSpace is looking for volunteer run leaders and community venues willing to host a group, particularly churches, though Jacky is clear it isn't only for churches. Get in touch at jacky@runningspace.org.