Between September 2023 and August 2024, HARAKA ran one of the largest community wellness programmes Abu Dhabi has seen, and the Endurance Event format was the part built to push people a bit further. Delivered through ACTIVE Communities, a partnership with Ma’an, The Authority of Social Contribution, the programme reached 49 parks and 6 malls across the emirate over that twelve month stretch. It wasn’t a one-off activation. It was a sustained, citywide effort to get people moving in the spaces they already pass through every day, whether that’s a neighbourhood park or the walkway outside a mall…
The Endurance Event sessions sat at the higher intensity end of the ACTIVE Communities offering. Where some formats focused on light movement or family friendly activity, this one asked participants to sustain effort over a longer period, building stamina and confidence in equal measure. It’s the kind of session that rewards people who keep coming back, and across the life of the programme a lot of people did exactly that.
The numbers behind ACTIVE Communities as a whole give a sense of scale. Over 34,600 participants, 34,631 individuals to be precise, took part across 672 sessions during the year. That’s an average of well over two sessions running somewhere in Abu Dhabi every single day, each one led by trained wellness ambassadors rather than volunteers picking things up as they go. In total, 638 ambassadors were trained to deliver the programme, and 38 companies came on board to support it, whether through sponsorship, staff participation or logistical help on the ground.
What made the Endurance Event format work within that structure was consistency. A participant in Khalifa City needed the same standard of session as one in Al Reem Island or at a mall activation downtown. That’s not a small ask when you’re spread across 49 parks and 6 malls with hundreds of ambassadors on rotation. It meant the format had to be simple enough to repeat accurately but demanding enough to still feel like a proper endurance challenge, not a watered down version of one.
Ma’an’s role in all this was central. As the Authority of Social Contribution, their mandate is about building social impact at a citywide level, and ACTIVE Communities was one of the clearest examples of that mandate put into practice. HARAKA brought the wellness delivery expertise, the training pipeline for ambassadors and the operational muscle to run hundreds of sessions without them feeling disjointed from one park to the next. Ma’an brought the reach, the community relationships and the backing needed to get 38 companies involved and public spaces opened up for structured activity.
For a lot of participants, the Endurance Event was their introduction to structured group fitness outside a gym setting. Public parks and mall concourses aren’t typically where people expect a proper workout, but that’s rather the point of the ACTIVE Communities model: meet people where they already are, in spaces they walk through anyway, and give them a reason to stop and do something harder than a stroll. Over a year and 672 sessions, that reason clearly resonated with tens of thousands of residents across Abu Dhabi.
Programmes like this don’t hold together because of one good session design. They hold together because of what happens behind the scenes, and that’s really where HARAKA’s day to day work sits. Running 672 sessions across 49 parks and 6 malls in a single year means building a delivery system that can be trusted to show up the same way, at the same standard, whether it’s a Tuesday morning in a quiet residential park or a Friday evening at a busy mall.
The starting point is the ambassadors. Training 638 of them isn’t a case of running one workshop and sending people out. It means building a curriculum that covers session structure, safety, crowd management in public spaces, and how to adapt an endurance format for whoever turns up on the day, families, fitness regulars, complete beginners. Ambassadors need to be confident enough to run a session solo in a park with no gym equipment and no controlled environment, which is a very different skill set from coaching in a studio.
Then there’s the scheduling side, which is unglamorous but does most of the heavy lifting. Someone has to work out which ambassadors go where, how sessions rotate across 55 locations, what equipment needs to travel with them, and how all of that lines up with park access, mall operating hours and the involvement of 38 different companies, each with their own staff calendars to coordinate around. Get that wrong and you end up with gaps in coverage or ambassadors double booked. Get it right and nobody watching from the outside even notices, because the sessions just happen, week after week.
This is also the kind of large-scale delivery HARAKA runs in Dubai, not just Abu Dhabi. The same logistics playbook, ambassador training, rotating schedules, multi-site coordination, applies whether the programme is government backed community activation or a corporate wellbeing rollout across several office sites. Community activations Dubai and community activations Abu Dhabi both draw on the same operational backbone, just adjusted for different partners and different public spaces.
As a wellbeing company Abu Dhabi based at its core, with the flagship gym at the International Tennis Centre in Zayed Sports City, HARAKA has built this operational capability over a fair few years of running programmes across the UAE. Beyond ACTIVE Communities, the same team structure supports Gym and Physical Wellness, Employee Wellbeing, Team Building, Events Management, School Outreach and Active Youth Holiday Camps, working with individuals, corporate teams, schools and government entities.
If your organisation is looking at a community activation, a wellbeing programme, or anything that needs reliable delivery across multiple sites, get in touch with the HARAKA team. We’re happy to talk through what worked in this programme and how a similar model could fit what you’re planning.
Written by Rensché Graham Corporate Wellness Manager, HARAKA, October 2026
Reviewed by Sam Bolger, Managing Partner, HARAKA, October 2026