A movement for movement

WellNation speaks to Julie Russell, the driving force behind the new Active Wellbeing Leadership Network, which aims to use collaboration in tackling inactivity and health inequalities

Julie Russell has spent more than three decades working across local government, building a career that has spanned leisure, culture, heritage, libraries, festivals and wellbeing. Beginning her career with Blyth Council in Northumberland, she quickly developed a belief that public services should extend beyond the walls of leisure centres to reach those who need them most. Working in a former coal mining community shaped her commitment to tackling inequality through access to physical activity, culture and creativity.

Today, alongside her role at Wakefield Council, Julie is convenor of the newly established Active Wellbeing Leadership Network and immediate past chair of CLOA (Chief Cultural & Leisure Officers Association). Across each role, she is driven by the same ambition: helping local authorities create healthier, more connected communities.

She believes opportunities to be active, creative and engaged are fundamental to improving health, wellbeing and life chances, particularly for those facing the greatest barriers. It is a philosophy that has underpinned her leadership throughout her career and continues to shape her work across the sector today.

What is the Active Wellbeing Leadership Network and why, and when, was it launched? The Active Wellbeing Leadership Network is a network of people and organisations who want to think differently about inactivity, health inequalities and the role of physical activity in creating healthier places. It is not a single organisation or a traditional representative body. It is deliberately neutrally held as a “network without boundaries”, open to people who share the ambition of creating the conditions for more active, healthier lives. The network emerged from earlier work around the future of public leisure, including the Local Government Physical Activity Partnership report on securing the future of public leisure in 2021 and the Sport England Future of Public Leisure report in 2022. By early 2024, with the policy context changing and a general election anticipated, there was a sense that a new narrative was needed — one that linked public leisure, physical activity, prevention, health inequalities and place-based leadership more clearly.

What are its aims and priorities? The network’s purpose is to create the conditions for stronger collaboration, clearer leadership and practical learning across the active wellbeing system. It is trying to connect, not duplicate, existing work. The ambition is to help local places move further and faster in tackling inactivity and health inequalities, while influencing the national frameworks and policy conditions that support local action.

Our priorities include developing a more common language across the system, strengthening the evidence base for policy and investment, supporting innovation, sharing national and international learning, and working hard to build the leadership capacity and capability in a complex world.

The challenges we face – inactivity, inequality, poor health, pressure on public services and the future of local infrastructure – do not sit neatly in one department or one sector. So the response and solution cannot sit neatly in one place either.

Underneath all of that is a simple aim: to make active wellbeing a valued contributor to a healthier, happier society, particularly for those communities who have the most to gain from being active.

What would you describe as its biggest achievements so far? One of the biggest achievements has been creating a trusted, neutral space where people from different parts of the system can come together and speak honestly. The network has helped build a shared language around active wellbeing and has given people a forum to think beyond individual services, facilities or organisational boundaries – this helps create important feedback loops, so we grow the conversation and keep learning as a network.

It has also helped give momentum to the idea that the facilities operated or offered (from parks to playgrounds to community centres and swimming pools), and the wider physical activity or wellbeing interventions, need to be seen as part of a wider preventative health system. The network has met in person several times, brought new voices into the conversation, developed thought pieces, shared case studies and created a platform for learning across places. The inaugural conference in Wakefield feels like an important next step because it has taken that energy and given people more time together to learn, challenge, connect and build confidence.

Who can be members and how can an organisation join or become involved? The network is open to anyone who shares the ambition and values. To date, that has included local authority leaders, leisure and physical activity professionals, health and social care colleagues, education, charities, voluntary and community organisations, operators, national bodies and others who want to help tackle inactivity and health inequalities.

The easiest way to get involved is to join the network’s conversations, attend events where places are available, follow the network’s updates and bring to the network your own wisdom and learning or practice, that others can benefit from. We are particularly interested in people and organisations who are prepared to share honestly — not only what has worked, but what has been difficult, what has failed and what still needs to change – as we will harvest far more learning this way.

The network is intentionally not trying to become another organisation in an already busy landscape. Its value is in connecting people, ideas and practice.

The network is intentionally not trying to become another organisation in an already busy landscape. Its value is in connecting people, ideas and practice. The challenges we face – inactivity, inequality, poor health, pressure on public services and the future of local infrastructure – do not sit neatly in one department or one sector. So the response and solution cannot sit neatly in one place either.

The network is about creating a movement for movement. It is about recognising that facilities matter, but that active wellbeing has to go way beyond bricks and mortar. It depends on leadership, data, creativity, community voice and lived experience, inclusion, prevention and the confi dence to work differently across systems.

Tell us about the Active Wellbeing Leadership Conference. What is it and who is it for? The Active Wellbeing Leadership Conference 2026 was the first national conference convened by the Active Wellbeing Leadership Network. It took place at WX Wakefield on 22 and 23 June 2026 and brought together leaders, practitioners and partners from across the active wellbeing system. It was designed for people working across leisure, local government, health, sport, physical activity, education, charities, the voluntary and community sector and others interested in tackling health inequalities, prevention and whole-system change. Across a day and a half, the aim was to create time and space for people to step back from day-to-day pressures, explore the changing national and local landscape, share and celebrate learning, look at data and evaluation, discuss leadership capability and capacity, and consider how place-based approaches can create healthier, more active communities.

What felt important about the conference was that it was not simply a programme of presentations. It was designed as a network- style event, with space for discussion, challenge, creativity and honest reflection. We wanted people to share good practice, but also to talk about what is difficult, what has not worked and where the system needs to change.

The venue helped with that. Holding the event at WX Wakefield, beneath Luke Jerram’s Helios sculpture, gave us a creative setting in which to think about complex challenges differently. That felt very fitting for a conference focused on active wellbeing, prevention, inequality and place.

It was the inaugural event this year – what can you tell us about next year’s conference? We have not formally confirmed the details of next year yet. What we can say is that the response to the network and to the conference has reinforced the need for more time together. The conference came about because people involved in the network were repeatedly asking for greater and more quality time to connect, refl ect and work through these issues in more depth.

So, while I would not want to pre-empt a formal decision about the format, timing or location, the intention is certainly to continue creating opportunities for leaders across the system to come together. Whether that is through another conference, network sessions, themed events or shared learning work, the need is clear. We are awaiting to review all of the feedback from the attendees and speakers, and we can take our next steps from there.

It is widely recognised that we need an integrated, whole-system approach to tackling inactivity — and for the sector to become part of a preventative health system. What inroads have been made compared with when you first started?

There has been real progress, even if it does not always feel fast enough. When I fi rst started working in this space, leisure and physical activity were often seen primarily through the lens of facilities, programmes or participation. Those things still matter, but the conversation has broadened, along with the breadth of attendees: from occupational therapists to older age experts. We are now talking much more about health inequalities, prevention, social value, community connection, local place leadership and the wider determinants of health.

By example, one of the key workshops at the conference focused on the cycle of decline for some of our young people, for whom their mental and physical health had created a barrier to entry level work: and no work, then led to further isolation and poorer health. Correcting the system for support to such individuals at an earlier stage, between agencies, could be transformative not just on their individual health, but their long-term contribution to society. The trailblazer in place in West and South Yorkshire and the North East are working collaboratively on this area right now.

There is also a stronger evidence base and a clearer national narrative. Sport England’s Uniting the Movement strategy makes tackling inequalities central to the future of sport and physical activity. The UK Chief Medical Officers’ physical activity guidance describes physical activity as something that can prevent and help treat many illnesses. The Moving Communities work is helping demonstrate the contribution that public leisure facilities and local activity in a place make to participation, social value and community wellbeing. Those are significant shifts.

The challenge now is implementation. We have better language, better evidence and more examples of place-based practice, but we still need to embed this thinking into mainstream health, local government, devolution and investment decisions – as the inequality in health is far and ‘widening’. We need to stem the current fl ow of ill health – whilst also get upstream – prevent another generation of ill-health.

How close are we to physical activity being seen, by government, as a genuine part of a preventative health system? Or is that utopia? I do not think it is utopia, but I do think we are still some distance from it being fully embedded. The direction of travel is encouraging. National strategies now recognise the importance of physical activity, prevention, health and wellbeing much more explicitly than they once did. The government’s Get Active strategy, for example, set ambitions to increase activity levels and recognised the importance of join-up between communities, schools and local healthcare systems.

But recognition is not the same as protected investment, or everyone in ‘power’ at all levels (from government departments to local place- based policy and decisions) ensuring that current investment is appropriately focused. Indeed, as Professor Marmott would say, it is applied with ‘Proportionate Universalism’. There are still many areas of the system where investment is focused more on the ‘active’- than those who are in greatest need of ‘moving more’. We all need to tackle this responsibly. Every leader, in every part of the system.

The sector still too often must prove its value project by project, facility by facility and budget cycle by budget cycle – which isn’t going to help the need to look more at system level to make the change and be less precious where the actual fi nancial gains appear! If active wellbeing is genuinely part of prevention, then it needs to be treated as part of the country’s core health, care and community infrastructure, not as discretionary spend or a ‘nice to have’. That means long-term investment and commitment across government both nationally and with regions and local place, and a much stronger commitment to the places and communities where inactivity and health inequalities are greatest so we can ‘shift the system’ to work a better way – a way that reduces inequalities.

If we are serious about prevention, active wellbeing needs to be designed into the way we live, that’s the way we travel, work, study and play…

If you could introduce or change one law, to make the biggest impact on people getting active, what would that be? I would ask for an equivalent to the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act 2015 already in place in Wales, maybe with some further ‘bells and whistles’, or greater pace to create system change.

A clear statutory expectation from central government to local, and across a range of public bodies (and indeed those funded to deliver public services), which says they must go about their duties, showing care for future generations and the environment we live in. Like Wales, wellbeing goals should include both active and creative health, to strive towards a heathier and more equal society. Active wellbeing (including creative health) is the single most affordable pill for health. Why wouldn’t we?

This approach should include recognising properly the distributive effects of any public funding, so we know the funding is reaching those where the society value, or true impact, will be the greatest. Indeed, it would rightly expect better ways to design in, or apply proportional universalism, to truly tackle the inequalities as we move forward.

If we are serious about prevention, active wellbeing needs to be designed into the way we live – the way we travel, work, study and play.

A future generations act would provide a perfect scaffold to drive long term change, across a complex system.