5. Active Design - Case study Our Parks: Bringing activity to the community

Description

The Our Parks programme runs its free exercise classes in parks across 18 London districts, with the aim to improve the health and wellbeing of local communities. Through the founder Born Barikor’s work in sports development, he identified three key barriers that communities face when looking to participate in exercise: finding a class, convenience and cost. Our Parks was developed to overcome these barriers, using local parks and open spaces to run a variety of group exercise classes, and smart phone apps to allow users to book. Using technology and social media, it creates a sense community encouraging retention and self-supporting network of like-minded individuals. The number of “parkers” has grown to 35,000 with a real sense of community.