Jubilee Park doesn’t normally double as a fitness venue. It’s a big, open, well-loved public space on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat corridor, the kind of place families visit for a walk or an evening out rather than a workout. For Hai Ramadan, that changed. HARAKA partnered with Ethara to turn the park into an active space for the duration of the event, and the brief was straightforward in theory and demanding in practice: give people of every age a reason to move during a season that’s usually associated with rest and reflection in the evenings.
The result had four distinct zones working at once. There was a kids’ zone, built to be genuinely fun rather than a token corner with a bouncy castle stuck in it. There was an adult fitness zone running structured classes throughout the event. Alongside that sat a programme of wellness workshops and talks, giving people a reason to stop, sit down and learn something rather than just pass through. And then there was the football pitch, set up for league-based games rather than casual kickabouts, which gave the space a competitive heartbeat that pulled people back day after day to see how their team was doing.
What made it work as a single event rather than four separate ones bolted together was the programming around it. Fitness classes for adults ran alongside yoga sessions and the wellness talks, so a parent could drop their kids into the kids’ zone, take a class themselves, and then wander over to catch a talk before collecting the kids again. Nobody had to choose between the family activity and their own workout. That’s a small logistical detail but it’s the difference between an activation people tolerate and one they actually plan their evening around.
Ramadan timing matters here too, even though the specifics of scheduling aren’t something we’ll go into. Hai Ramadan is an event built around the rhythms of the season, and an active park needs to respect that rather than fight it. Getting the balance right between energetic programming and the more reflective, communal mood of the evenings was as much a part of the job as running the sessions themselves.
The football league element deserves a mention on its own. League-based games give a public activation something that one-off drop-in sports sessions don’t: a reason to come back. If your team plays again in two days, you’re going to be there in two days, and you’re probably going to bring people with you. It turned a corner of the park into a small, recurring fixture within a much bigger event, and it’s exactly the sort of detail that separates an activation with actual staying power from one that peaks on day one and empties out by day three.
HARAKA managed the whole thing end-to-end, which in practice meant everything from the physical setup of four different activity zones to the staffing, the coaching, the workshop facilitation and the day-to-day running of it all for the length of the event. Thousands of people came through Jubilee Park over the course of Hai Ramadan, and by all accounts the thing they walked away with wasn’t just a nice evening out, it was a memory of the park being somewhere active and alive during a period when many public spaces go quiet.
The Hai Ramadan activation is a decent example of something we do a lot at HARAKA, which is take on a brief that on paper looks like it needs four or five different vendors and deliver it as one team instead. A kids’ zone is usually one supplier’s job. Adult fitness classes are usually someone else’s. Wellness talks and yoga tend to come from another provider entirely, and a football league with proper officiating is its own separate booking. For Hai Ramadan, all of that sat under HARAKA, run by one team that had already worked out how the pieces fit together before the first attendee arrived.
That’s not a small thing for an event organiser to hear. Coordinating five suppliers means five contracts, five points of failure, and five different people to manage on site when something inevitably needs adjusting on the day. Coordinating one wellbeing company in Abu Dhabi that already runs gyms, fitness programmes, schools activities and event operations as its day job means one conversation, one team, and one point of accountability. We built HARAKA to offer exactly that kind of range, gym and physical wellness, employee wellbeing, team building, events management, school outreach and active youth holiday camps, precisely so a client doesn’t have to go shopping across six different companies to cover six different needs.
Working with Ethara on this one was a good fit for that reason. They know how to put together a big public event, we know how to fill it with activity that actually gets people moving, and Jubilee Park benefited from both sides doing what they’re best at rather than either side stretching into territory they don’t know well.
Park and public space activations like this aren’t a one-off for us either. It’s the same thinking behind our ACTIVE Communities work, where we bring structured, accessible fitness programming into public spaces across the emirate rather than keeping it confined to a gym. Community activations Abu Dhabi residents actually turn up to need more than a stage and a few branded flags. They need programming that gives people something to do at every age and fitness level, and that’s the part we specialise in.
If you’re planning an event, a public space activation or a community day and you like the idea of dealing with one wellness partner instead of several, we’d be glad to talk through what a HARAKA-run activation could look like for your site. Drop us a line and we’ll find a time to chat about it.
Written by Rensché Graham Corporate Wellness Manager, HARAKA, October 2026
Reviewed by Sam Bolger, Managing Partner, HARAKA, October 2026