Beautiful work begins with beautiful wonderings.
What is here, and how might we meet it well?
How might we draw on the knowledge, experience, and gifts already among us to move what matters forward?
How might we reach our goals in ways that help us come more alive along the way?
Running Rivers is a place-based practice accompanying people, organizations and communities as they navigate change, cultivate possibility, deepen relationships, develop the capacity to act together and shape the future that they envision.
Independently held. Interdependently practiced.
ORIENTATION
How we move matters.
Sometimes the invitation comes through disruption or uncertainty. Sometimes through an emerging possibility. Sometimes through a quiet wondering.
My orientation begins with deep listening, attention to context, and respect for the knowledge and lived experience of the people and places involved.
Together, we can draw on what you already know, discover new possibilities, and move towards what matters most to you. Whether navigating a difficult transition, strengthening a partnership, or pursuing an emerging possibility, I help people find a way forward that honors both the work and the relationships that sustain it.
I believe love, humility, reciprocity, gratitude, poetry, and presence belong within consequential work, not adjacent to it.
Offerings of Running Rivers
Three streams of a shared practice. Each with a purpose of its own, yet connected to the others.
Engagements
Cultivating what becomes possible together.
Offering facilitation, convening, strategy cultivation, community engagement, coalition building, leadership support, and longer-term accompaniment.
Pilgrimages
Deepening relationship with rivers, trails, and place.
Offering opportunities to move attentively through landscapes for discovery, gratitude, stewardship, and connection. Emerging. Reach out if curious or have ideas.
Writings
Following the questions that ask something of us.
Offering reflections and essays exploring community, belonging, movement, rupture, reconnection, and regeneration. Emerging. Reach out if curious or have ideas.
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.
I've also spent decades running, writing, practicing contemplation, and caring for the places I love. Running Rivers is an invitation to bring more of what enlivens me into the work I feel called to do.
I live in Roseburg, Oregon, within the Umpqua watershed, with my wife, Keavy, our three beautiful kiddos, a big cat, and a little dog. I love spending time with my family, running along rivers and trails throughout Oregon and beyond, and playing in the woods. Things I'm trying to learn: how to juggle and play the guitar better.
What might we cultivate together?
Perhaps you’re navigating a change, nurturing a possibility, wondering how to bring people together around something that matters, feel it might be time to go after that dream, or just want to run some trails…
I’d welcome a conversation to see what might be possible, together.