Beautiful work begins with beautiful wonderings.
What might become possible if we listened more deeply? If we made more room for the knowledge, experience, and gifts already among us? If we let ourselves believe in the more beautiful world we imagine?
Running Rivers is a place-based practice accompanying people, organizations, and communities as they navigate change, cultivate possibility, deepen relationships, and develop the capacity to act together.
Independently held. Interdependently practiced.
Currents of Running Rivers
Three expressions of a shared practice. Each with a purpose of its own.
Engagements
Cultivating what becomes possible together.
Facilitation, convening, strategy cultivation, community engagement, coalition building, leadership support, and longer-term accompaniment.
Pilgrimages
Deepening relationship with rivers, trails, and place.
Moving attentively through landscapes offers opportunities for discovery, gratitude, stewardship, and connection. Depth before distance.
Writings
Following the questions that ask something of us.
Reflections and essays exploring community, belonging, movement, rupture, reconnection, and regeneration.
New Moon Currents — an emerging offering
THE PRACTICE
How we move matters.
Sometimes the invitation comes through disruption or uncertainty. Sometimes through an emerging possibility. Sometimes through a quiet wondering.
My approach begins with deep listening, attention to context, and respect for the knowledge and lived experience of the people and places involved.
Together, we can discern direction, create and give emerging insight a useful form.
I believe love, humility, reciprocity, gratitude, poetry, and presence belong within consequential work, not adjacent to it.
Hello, I’m Max.
For over two decades, I’ve worked alongside rural communities, nonprofits, philanthropy, public institutions, and other partners, particularly across Oregon and Siskiyou County.
Running Rivers brings this work into closer relationship with running, pilgrimage, writing, contemplative practice, and care for place. It is an invitation to bring more of what I love into the vocation I feel called to.
I live in Roseburg, Oregon, within the Umpqua watershed, with my wife, Keavy, our three children, a big cat, and a little dog. I love spending time with my family, running along rivers and trails throughout Oregon and beyond, playing in the woods, and discovering what the natural world has to teach me.
What might we cultivate together?
Perhaps you’re navigating a consequential change, nurturing an emerging possibility, or wondering how to bring people together around something that matters.
Perhaps our paths simply share a stretch of river. I’d welcome a conversation.