There’s a moment in every school wellbeing programme where the adults have to step back and let the students take over. That’s the whole idea behind Healthy School Leaders, HARAKA’s initiative to turn students into wellness ambassadors inside their own schools rather than passengers in someone else’s programme.
The pilot ran across 15 schools in the UAE and involved 30 student volunteers aged between 15 and 18. Rather than sending trainers in to run sessions and leave, HARAKA built a 10-week programme that put the students themselves at the centre of the work. Over those ten weeks, the volunteers worked through health and wellness education, built leadership skills, and then used what they’d learned to start their own wellbeing projects inside their school communities. It wasn’t a course that ended with a certificate and a handshake. It ended with students running something real, in front of their own peers and teachers.
The structure mattered here. Ten weeks is long enough to move past a one-off assembly or a single workshop, but short enough to keep momentum. The first stretch focused on grounding the students in the fundamentals of health and wellness, the kind of knowledge they’d need before they could credibly speak to it. From there, the programme shifted towards leadership, teaching the volunteers how to plan, communicate and carry a group of their peers through an initiative rather than just present information at them. By the final weeks, each group was initiating its own wellbeing project, designed and delivered inside their own school.
Throughout the programme, the HARAKA team stayed close to the students rather than handing them a curriculum and walking away. That meant working alongside them as they shaped their projects, helping troubleshoot when ideas needed refining, and making sure each initiative had a realistic chance of landing well within its school community. It’s a fine line to walk. Push too hard and it stops being the students’ project. Step back too far and momentum stalls before week five. The team’s role was to nurture rather than direct, giving the volunteers enough support to succeed without taking the ownership away from them.
The results from the pilot speak for themselves. Across the 15 schools, the programme’s reach extended to more than 12,000 individuals, a figure that includes the students, their peers, and the wider school communities touched by the projects the volunteers went on to run. That’s a genuinely large multiplier from a starting group of just 30 volunteers, and it’s the clearest evidence that the “train the leader” approach works at scale. One student, properly equipped and supported, can influence a school of hundreds.
What makes Healthy School Leaders stand apart from a typical school visit or workshop day is that it wasn’t built to be a single event. It was built as a pipeline: identify students who are willing to lead, give them real skills over a sustained period, and then get out of the way while they apply those skills somewhere that matters to them. The 15 schools involved were spread across the UAE, meaning the approach had to work across different school cultures and student populations, not just one flagship campus. That the model held up across such a diverse group of schools is part of why HARAKA has continued to build on it since.
Healthy School Leaders sits at the heart of something we think about a lot at HARAKA: the difference between delivering a wellbeing programme to young people and building young people who can run wellbeing programmes themselves. Both have their place. But if you only ever do the first, the impact stops the moment your team leaves the building. If you do the second properly, the impact keeps going long after you’ve packed up and moved on to the next school.
That’s why our approach to school outreach leans so heavily on leadership development rather than straightforward delivery. When we work with a school, we’re not just trying to run a good session. We’re trying to identify the students who are already halfway to being leaders and give them the tools, the confidence and the structure to take that further. It’s a slower way to work than turning up with a fixed programme and running it top-down, and it asks more of us as a team, because we have to coach individuals rather than just manage a room. But the payoff is a form of impact that multiplies rather than fades, which is exactly what we saw with the 12,000-plus reach from a pilot group of 30 students.
This thinking runs through the rest of our school outreach work too. We’ve taken a similar approach with our schools campaign around the World Tennis League, another example of getting young people actively involved in wellness rather than just talking at them. It’s part of a wider pattern in how we think about schools: less lecture, more ownership.
School outreach is one of six core services we run at HARAKA, alongside Gym & Physical Wellness, Employee Wellbeing, Team Building, Events Management, and Active Youth Holiday Camps. We’re an Abu Dhabi based wellbeing company, with our flagship gym at the International Tennis Centre in Zayed Sports City, and over the years we’ve built relationships with individuals, corporate teams, schools and government entities right across the UAE. Whether it’s a school, a workplace, or a large-scale event, a lot of our thinking comes back to the same principle we used in Healthy School Leaders: build capability in people, don’t just deliver a service to them.
We’re proud of what community activations Abu Dhabi programmes like this can do when they’re given the time and structure to actually take root, and we’d love to bring that same thinking to your school, workplace or event. If you’re curious about what a leadership-led wellness programme could look like for your organisation, get in touch with the HARAKA team and we can talk through what might work.
Written by Rensché Graham Corporate Wellness Manager, HARAKA, October 2026
Reviewed by Sam Bolger, Managing Partner, HARAKA, October 2026