Not everyone who turns up to a park on a Saturday morning wants to run a personal best. Some people just want to walk with a neighbour, get some air, and feel like they’re part of something. That’s the thinking behind the Active Community: Run and Walk Event, one of the formats HARAKA delivers under the wider ACTIVE Communities initiative, and it’s a project we’re genuinely fond of because it’s less about performance and more about participation…
The Run and Walk Event sits within HARAKA’s Community Programmes category and was built on a simple idea: put an activity in a public park that anyone can join, regardless of fitness level, age, or whether they’ve ever done an organised fitness session in their life. No qualifying times, no pace groups you need to keep up with, no sense that you’re the slowest person there. You can run it, jog it, or walk it with a friend, and the event works the same way either way. That low barrier to entry is the whole point. A lot of community fitness activity ends up preaching to the converted, reaching people who were already going to the gym anyway. This format was designed to reach past that group, into families, older residents, people recovering from injury, or people who simply haven’t exercised in years and find the idea of a “run club” a bit off-putting.
The Run and Walk Event is one strand of ACTIVE Communities, a programme HARAKA delivered together with Ma’an, The Authority of Social Contribution, across Abu Dhabi. Over the course of the initiative, running from September 2023 to August 2024, the programme reached 49 parks and 6 malls across the emirate. In total, more than 34,600 participants, 34,631 individuals to be precise, took part across 672 sessions, supported by 638 trained wellness ambassadors on the ground and 38 participating companies backing the initiative. Those numbers cover the whole ACTIVE Communities programme rather than this format alone, but they give a sense of the scale HARAKA was operating at, and the Run and Walk Event was a core part of how that reach was built.
What made the format work, from what our team saw on site, was consistency of tone. Wellness ambassadors were trained to welcome first-timers the same way they welcomed people who did this every week. Sessions were run in public parks rather than gyms or private facilities, which mattered because parks are neutral ground. Nobody has to sign up for a membership, put on the right kit, or feel like they’ve walked into someone else’s space. You just show up.
Delivering something at this scale, across dozens of parks and malls with hundreds of trained ambassadors, takes proper logistics, but the format itself stayed simple by design. That’s a deliberate trade-off. It would be easier to run a flashier, more structured event, but a Run and Walk format that anyone can drop into is what actually gets numbers like 34,600 participants through the door across a year. Scale and simplicity tend to go together in this kind of community work, and this project is a decent example of why.
We didn’t stumble into designing the Run and Walk Event this way. Accessibility is something we think about deliberately across HARAKA’s work, and it’s arguably the single biggest factor in whether a community activation actually reaches the people it’s meant to reach. It’s easy to build a fitness event for people who are already fit. It’s much harder, and much more useful, to build one that a 60 year old, a 10 year old, and someone who hasn’t exercised since school can all take part in at the same time, on the same course, without anyone feeling out of place.
That’s a thread running through a lot of our community activations in Abu Dhabi, not just this one. When we plan a session, whether it’s a park event, a school outreach visit, or a corporate team building day, we ask whether someone with zero fitness background could walk in and feel comfortable within five minutes. If the answer is no, we adjust the format. Trained wellness ambassadors matter here too. Their job isn’t to demonstrate how fit they are, it’s to read the room, adjust pace, and make sure nobody at the back of the group feels forgotten. That’s a skill in itself, and it’s one we invest time training people in.
We’re an Abu Dhabi based wellbeing company with our flagship gym at the International Tennis Centre in Zayed Sports City, and we’ve been building programmes like this for a good few years now. Our work spans six core services, Gym & Physical Wellness, Employee Wellbeing, Team Building, Events Management, School Outreach, and Active Youth Holiday Camps, and we work across individuals, corporate teams, schools, and government entities throughout the UAE. What ties all of that together, and what a project like the Run and Walk Event shows quite plainly, is a belief that wellness only really works if it’s accessible. A gym programme that only serves people who are already comfortable in a gym isn’t doing much. A community event that only draws people who already run doesn’t move the needle on public health.
Partnerships like the one with Ma’an matter for exactly this reason. Working with an authority focused on social contribution means the goal isn’t just attendance figures, it’s genuine community reach, and that pushes us to keep asking whether our formats are truly open to everyone. We think that’s the right question to keep asking, whether we’re planning a park event, a workplace wellbeing programme, or a school session.
If you’re a government entity, a mall operator, or a company thinking about how to get your community or your people moving in a way that actually includes everyone, we’d be happy to talk through what a format like this could look like for you. Get in touch with our team and we can walk you through how we’d approach it.
Written by Rensché Graham Corporate Wellness Manager, HARAKA, October 2026
Reviewed by Sam Bolger, Managing Partner, HARAKA, October 2026