Historical Development - Pertubuhan Pengurusan Taman, Ameniti dan Rekreasi Malaysia (MyParks)

MyParks was founded on 10 July 2003 as an online community at Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) in Shah Alam Selangor, Malaysia.

The group’s aim was to establish a channel for students, lecturers, and the community in the park, amenity and recreation field to communicate among each other on anything and everything about parks and recreation.

It also acted as a supporter to the UiTM’s Center of Parks and Amenity Management Studies which was established earlier in 2001. MyParks continued the support role over the next 9 years and saw membership grew from 2 administrators to over 1000 members. The group comprised largely of park students, lecturers, alumni, the government employees and public.

In 2012, there was a renewed interest from a small group of individuals to look at park and recreation as a new profession and to consider formalising to register a park association with the government.

With a dedicated and commited team led by Dato’ Ismail Ngah (Former Director General of National Landscape Department) a special meeting was held on 27 November 2012 at the Forest Research Institute of Malaysia (FRIM) to discuss the formation of a national association on park and recreation.

In that meeting, Dato Ismail had proposed to use MyParks as the acronym and its history for the new association. While the original name is Malaysia Parks (hence the word Myparks), the new one is called Malaysia Parks, Amenity and Recreation Society. The effort to register MyParks proceeded later with a few more meetings and discussions and on 15 Jan 2014 a grand meeting was held in UiTM to form a protem committee in a process to get it registered.

The first application to the Registrar of Societies (ROS) was rejected due to the naming of the association in English, the association’s purpose, membership types, and scope of the profession. The second submission was finally approved on 8 June 2014 with registration number PPM-017-10-08062014. The approved association name is called Pertubuhan Pengurusan Taman, Ameniti dan Rekreasi Malaysia (Malaysia Parks, Amenity and Recreation Management Society – MyParks).