“Why doesn’t Park Yoga run all year?”
It’s a question we’re often asked – and it’s a very fair one.
Park Yoga is all about making it easy for people to be active in nature and connected to their local community. So why do our free sessions only run for 20 weeks of the year, from May to September?
There are two main reasons: the British weather and our finances.
The weather matters
We love being outdoors, but we also know that there are limits to what works when you’re practising yoga in a park.
Park Yoga sessions are designed to be welcoming, enjoyable and accessible to everyone, including people who may be new to yoga or physical activity. Asking someone to come along to their first yoga session on a cold, wet or windy Sunday morning isn’t quite the experience we want to offer.
And we know this from experience.
We have tried running Park Yoga for longer periods in the past, including extending the season beyond the summer months. What we found was that more sessions were cancelled because of poor weather, while attendance dropped significantly when conditions were cold or wet. That matters because our aim isn’t simply to put sessions on. It’s to create regular opportunities for people to be active and that they genuinely want to attend.
The May-to-September season gives us the best chance of achieving that. The weather is generally more suitable, and people are much more likely to want to get outside and enjoy a Sunday morning yoga session.
Of course, the weather can still surprise us! But limiting the season to 20 weeks means we can maximise the number of sessions that actually go ahead and the number of people who benefit from them.
Why don’t you do it inside?
Nature connectivity is a massive part of our Park Yoga experience: the park, fresh air, natural surroundings, bird song and connection to the outdoors are fundamental to the Park Yoga joy.
Moving indoors would create a completely different community experience, and move away from the essence of who we are. We know many of our instructors host their own community classes indoors during the off-season and we love how many of our yogis continue their practice with their instructor in this way.
There’s a financial reality too
The second reason is much less visible, but just as important.
Park Yoga is free for everyone who attends – but delivering it isn’t free.
Every Sunday, qualified local instructors are paid to deliver sessions, alongside the costs of running a national charity, supporting our venues and instructors, communicating with participants, monitoring our impact, providing and maintaining equipment and flags, and developing Park Yoga so that more people can take part.
At the moment, we simply don’t have sufficient funding to deliver Park Yoga for more than 20 weeks a year.
We are a growing charity, and demand for Park Yoga continues to increase. But growth also comes with costs. Every new venue means another instructor to fund and another location to support.
Our Venue Host Organisations help make Park Yoga possible by contributing towards the cost of their local instructor. We also rely on grants, sponsorship, donations and other income to fund the national infrastructure that sits behind the sessions.
We would love to have the financial resources to offer more weeks in the future. But we don’t want to make promises we can’t sustainably deliver.
Why 20 weeks?
So, 20 weeks is a balance.
It gives us a long enough season to help people build a regular habit of being active, while concentrating our resources on the time of year when people are most likely to attend and sessions are most likely to go ahead.
And there’s another benefit: we can make those 20 weeks count.
Rather than spreading our resources more thinly across the year, we can focus on delivering high-quality, welcoming sessions during the months when outdoor yoga works best in the UK.
We can also use the months outside the Park Yoga season to plan, recruit and train instructors and volunteers, build relationships with local communities and partners, raise funds, evaluate our impact and prepare for the next season.
The break means that come each May our Park Yogis can’t wait to get out into their local parks with us again.
What happens when Park Yoga isn’t running?
Just because our free outdoor sessions finish in September it doesn’t mean we stop thinking about movement and wellbeing…
Our Park Yoga community continues beyond the 20-week season, and we encourage participants to keep moving in whatever way works for them.
You can:
- Practise yoga at home: visit our YouTube channel with lots of free to access content;
- Practise yoga with your instructor: many of our instructors continue community focussed classes on a Sunday, often on a Sunday morning. Check out your Venue Facebook page where your instructor will have posted their winter classes;
- Go for a walk in your local park, try another form of physical activity or simply spend time outdoors.
There are lots of ways to keep the positive habits you’ve developed during the Park Yoga season going throughout the year.
And, of course, we’ll be back the following spring!
Could Park Yoga ever run for longer?
For now, 20 weeks is the right model for Park Yoga.
It reflects what we’ve learned from running sessions in parks, what our participants tell us through their attendance and feedback, and what we can sustainably afford as a charity.
So, when you join us on a sunny Sunday morning between May and September, remember that those 20 weeks are the result of a lot of learning, planning and hard work behind the scenes.
20 weeks might not sound like very much – but when thousands of people across the UK come together every Sunday, it can make a huge difference.
And that’s why we’ll keep doing everything we can to make every Park Yoga season the best it can be.
20 weeks. One beautiful season. Then we meet again next May.