Following years of campaigning to secure the future of Abney Park, the Trust confirms changes to refresh the way it works

We’re inviting groups to join for free, and we’re putting together a future plan for events and community work.

Here’s why we’re doing what we’re doing.

Read our full letter here and our proposed next steps summary here

Abney Park Trust is an embedded community organisation with years and years of experience delivering improvements in Abney Park.

Like all well-run charities, trustees are recruited on the basis of their skills, abilities, attitudes and willingness to share their time for free.

When we recruit trustees (except for council representatives), we publish detailed adverts setting out what skills and experiences are needed – like this one, this one and this one.

Like many charities, we devise role descriptions and sets of interview questions. Like many charities, we score interviewees according to criteria. And like many charities, we select people based only on how well their skills and experiences fit what the Trust needs.

This approach has, in recent years, allowed us to recruit local trustees from all sorts of fields – like ecology, senior levels of local government, entrepreneurship, heritage, community venue management, the law, urban planning, advertising, social work, accountancy, academia and more.

The trustees we’ve recruited are people who have family outings in the park, walk their dogs there, care for family members there, meet their friends there, do creative work there. They’re people aged from their 20s to their 70s, all of whom live near – in many cases very near – the park.

Trustees at Abney Park Trust volunteer their time to make decisions without anything other than the charity’s best interests (now and in the future) and Charity Commission guidance in mind.

We employ staff, occupy buildings, produce business plans, team up with council officers, run events that attract a four-figure number of people a year. We have the right trustee team in place to do that well.

Read our full letter here and our proposed next steps summary here

We’re proud to be a small part of the rich, vibrant mix of different communities that make up the borough of Hackney. As we next go out to recruit trustees, we welcome every single application. Aside from trusteeships, our info@abneypark.org inbox is full of local people willing to volunteer their time on everything from history book design to filmmaking, and litter picking to historical research.

What’s coming next? We’re speaking to local groups and organisations, asking them if they’d like to become what we call “corporate members”.

That’ll let us see lots of different perspectives on how things might work in the park, and factor those in when we make decisions. 

And we’re writing a plan for how our events and other work are going to be funded in the future. We’ll talk about it at our AGM later in the autumn.

This work won’t be done in a day. But the impact of it will last for years and years.

Read our full letter here and our proposed next steps summary here

Finally, we want to be clear: we have no intention of seeking to take back the management of Abney Park from Hackney Council. 

Suggestions we are seeking to do this have been made by Abney Park User Group, and are simply fictitious. 

We have an excellent and open relationship with Hackney councillors and officers, respecting the trade-offs they have to make in these tough times – even when that has meant them ending our core grant funding.

Our annual general meetings (AGMs) are open to all. And minutes are available here, dating back years, for everyone to read – reflecting a level of transparency introduced under the current Trust leadership.

Our next AGM will be on 27th November 2025 in the evening, in the Delph Room on site.

Want to know more, or get involved in the Trust’s work?

  • Read our full letter here and our proposed next steps summary here

Adminstrator