This article addresses the challenge of promoting physical activity through a focus on equity and engaging physically inactive citizens through the development of inclusive strategies within parkrun UK—a free, volunteer-led, weekly mass community participation running event. We discuss how a UK-based action research design enabled collaboration with volunteer event organizers to understand participant experiences, constraints and develop localized inclusive practices. In contrast with ‘expert’-driven health behaviour interventions, our research pursued a ‘ground up’ approach by asking what can be learnt from the successes and challenges of organizing community events, such as parkrun UK, to promote inclusion? A modified participatory action research approach was used with four parkrun sites across England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, that involved quantitative and qualitative analysis of survey data (n = 655) that informed the process. Our analysis explored parkrunners’ and volunteer organizers’ perceptions relating to (i) the demographics of parkrun participation and (ii) actions for change in relation to the challenges of engaging marginalized groups (women, ethnic minorities, low income, older people, those with disabilities or illness). We discuss the challenges and opportunities for addressing (in)equity and inclusion through volunteer-based organizations and the implications for translating knowledge into organizational strategies.

When we observe actions, we activate parietal and premotor areas that are also recruited when we perform actions ourselves. It has been suggested that this action mirroring is causally involved in the process of action understanding. Alternatively, it might reflect the outcome of action understanding, with the underlying cognitive processes taking place elsewhere. To identify and characterize areas involved in action understanding, we presented participants with point-light displays depicting human actions and engaged them in tasks that required identifying the effector (arm/leg) or the goal of an action. We observed a stronger blood oxygen level-dependent signal during the Goal in comparison to the Effector Task not only in premotor areas, but also in the middle temporal gyrus (MTG) and the anterior ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. In the MTG, the Goal Task led to a signal higher than the Effector Task only when actions were easy to understand, whereas frontal areas showed this difference also when the task was difficult, a finding that is not caused by a ceiling effect. Our results suggest an interplay between temporal and frontal areas that is modulated by task difficulty and thus provide important constraints for biologically plausible models of action understanding.