A few months ago, while working with Jenny's Place, I met Angelo Piccione. Within a few minutes I was drawn right into his story. Angelo is the founder of Good Shepherd Support Services, and he is preparing to run 1,680 kilometres from Newcastle to Beenleigh and back to raise awareness and funds for Jenny's Place. It's a huge, ridiculous goal! Which is probably why I immediately liked him.
I love meeting a fellow dreamer, especially someone willing to say an idea out loud before every detail is sorted and success is certain. Angelo hadn’t been wondering whether he might do something one day. He had made the decision and was already training. But as he told me more, I realised the run was only the latest chapter in a much bigger story.
So I invited him to speak at Good Hunter, our monthly gathering for people who believe business can be a force for good. He called his talk “The Seeds We Water”. He gave everyone in the room a mustard seed and asked a simple question: how big does something have to be before we believe it can change a life?
For Angelo, many of the biggest shifts in his life began with something small. A word of encouragement. A painful experience. A person he loved. Each planted a seed. His point was that a seed can sit in the ground for years and never become what it might have been. At some point, we have to decide whether we will water it.
For most of his early life, Angelo believed his future was in rugby league. He pursued it with enormous determination and eventually earned a place in the Italian squad preparing for the 2017 Rugby League World Cup. Then, in one tackle, he ruptured the C4 and C5 vertebrae in his neck. The future he had built his identity around disappeared almost at once. “No overseas contract. No football. No World Cup. No plan.”
Around the same time, his partner, encouraged him to enrol at university. Angelo had spent much of his life believing he wasn’t smart enough to study. He first agreed because it gave him another chance to play football, but he stayed, completed a psychology degree and began to question the limits he had placed on himself. She had planted the seed. Angelo watered it by saying ‘yes’.
That new belief in himself became important when his nephew Moses, who lives with cerebral palsy, became dangerously unwell after receiving poor support in shared accommodation. Angelo had helped care for Moses from a young age and knew what good care could mean in someone’s life. Rather than stay angry at the system, he decided to build something better. In 2021, he founded Good Shepherd Support Services. He worked night shifts while building the business during the day, and after eight months without a participant, the first one came. Then another. Today, Good Shepherd supports people across Newcastle, the Lower Hunter, the Central Coast and Sydney.
The biggest turning point in Angelo’s story came through a loss no family should have to carry. In 2015, his 12-year-old niece Aliyah was murdered by her stepfather. His family was large and close, yet they hadn’t understood what Aliyah, her mother and her sisters were living through. Domestic violence had been hidden through coercion and control. Years later, Angelo and Lauren became carers for Aliyah’s younger sister. They didn’t have all the answers, but they learnt that love often looks like turning up again tomorrow, and showing through ordinary actions that someone matters.
In 2024, Angelo and the Good Shepherd team decided to hold a gala for an organisation responding to domestic violence. They chose Jenny’s Place. In just eight weeks, they organised Shining Together: Moses’ Gala Night and raised more than $10,000. The event brought two parts of Angelo’s life together. It honoured Moses, whose life had shaped Good Shepherd, while raising money in memory of Aliyah and supporting women and children experiencing domestic violence.
(Jenny’s Place has supported women and children experiencing domestic violence or homelessness in Newcastle since 1977. Mezzanine has worked alongside the organisation for many years, helping with its brand, communication, fundraising and community engagement. Through that work, we have seen the practical difference Jenny’s Place makes when a woman or child needs somewhere safe to turn. That connection is how I came to meet Angelo.)
The gala went well, but Angelo felt there was more he could do. He wanted to take on something personal and difficult. Something big enough to get people talking about domestic violence beyond one night and one room. So he decided to run.
His first plan was Newcastle to the Gold Coast and back. He later changed the destination to Beenleigh because of its high rates of domestic violence. The run would begin in Newcastle, where Jenny’s Place has supported women and children for nearly 50 years, and continue to another community carrying a heavy burden from the same issue. Then he would turn around and run home. All up, around 1,680 kilometres.
When Angelo first shared the idea, he was 25 kilograms heavier than he is now and had little experience as a long-distance runner. Since then, he has lost weight, worked through ankle problems, completed a half marathon, attempted a 120-kilometre ultramarathon and finished his first marathon. When he stopped at 50 kilometres during the ultra, he realised he needed more time and moved the full run to 2027. Nothing would stop him!
I respect that as much as the size of the goal itself. Big ideas don’t become credible because someone ignores the hard parts. They become credible when a person tests themselves against the work and changes the plan without walking away from the reason they began.
The Good Shepherd team has been part of the story from the start. They brought the gala to life and continue to stand behind the run. Jenny’s Place gives the effort somewhere practical to land, turning awareness and fundraising into support for women and children who need safety and a way forward.
Angelo summed up his thinking at Good Hunter in one line: “Purpose isn’t something we find. It’s something we cultivate, one decision, one act of courage and one act of love at a time.”
That is why I wanted to share his story.
I think many of us have been given seeds throughout our lives. A person who believed in us. An experience that changed our direction. A problem we can no longer ignore. An idea that keeps returning.
For Angelo, watering the seed meant enrolling at university when he believed he wasn’t smart enough. It meant starting Good Shepherd before he knew how to build a business. It meant caring for his family without having all the answers. And now it means training for a run that still sits well beyond what he can do today.
I hope his story makes you think about the seeds you have been given and the responsibility you might have to help them grow.
And you can be part of Angelo’s story too. Follow the run. Share it. Donate to Jenny’s Place. Tell someone else what he is attempting and why.
What seed have you been given?
And what are you going to do with it?
Join the ‘Pain to Purpose’ story.
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