How to build a neighborhood playground: recommended resources at KaBOOM! by Lisa Palmer

in Asset-Based Community Development, community engagement, Place-based communities, Psychology

Seventh in our Best practices in Community Empowerment series.

Lisa Palmer (@lattman) is Director for Corporate Partnerships at KaBOOM! where she encourages corporations to participate in making kids’ dreams come true by building the kind of playgrounds that inspired her to play, and dream, as a child.

Play Matters - Great ideas and examples for developing public partnerships around ensuring that children in communities nationwide have access to great places to play.

KaBOOM! Online Trainings – Online trainings and resources that teach folks a variety of topics about play, including how to build a playground from scratch to how to advocate for play in their community.  Trainings may also feature community gardens, working to Save Play, etc.

DIY Planner at kaboom.org – The comprehensive sections of the KaBOOM! Toolkit are designed to walk you through the process of how to create a community-build playspace. From fundraising to volunteer recruitment, the Toolkit can help you take your project from start to finish with over a decade’s worth of KaBOOM! knowledge, advice, and best practices in building playspaces.

The Toolkit is designed to work hand-in-hand with the KaBOOM! Project Planner. The new planner gives you a free Web site that helps you Plan each step of your project, Communicate with your team, Recruit local volunteers, Raise money, Get free advice from the professional playground builders at KaBOOM!, Connect with a community of people like you who are building playspaces around the country.

Happy building!

Next up: Julian Dobson

KaBOOM! Playground Build in West Oakland

in Asset-Based Community Development, community engagement, Place-based communities, Psychology

Some of my pictures, videos and tweets from the KaBOOM! Playground Build Day at Wade Johnson Park and the Oakland School Police HQ, Acorn & Lower Bottoms neighborhoods, West Oakland.

From an introduction by Carletta Starks, one of the principal organizers of the event:  Why Wade Johnson Park: OUSD Police Services Chief, Pete Sarna, recognized that the children in the area did not have a playground or other activities to keep them busy, and identified Wade Johnson as a Park that could be developed for the children in the area. Chief Sarna contacted KaBOOM! and worked with the City of Oakland Redevelopment Agency to get accepted as a site for a KaBOOM! Project. The site was approved, and KaBOOM! and its funding partner, Foresters, began the process that led up to Build Day.

Who is KaBOOM!: KaBOOM! is a non-profit organization dedicated to saving play and fighting the Play Deficit by ensuring that every child has a great place to play within walking distance.

Live tweets with pics here: scroll down to April 30, from 8AM to 3PM

Some Photos

Some Video

See also: KaBOOM! – Empowering Neighborhoods and Restoring Play; Foresters post-event press release; More photos, from Yuan Zhu.

About us

in Asset-Based Community Development, community engagement, Place-based communities, Psychology

Building blocks for building communities

  • Our purpose is to provide a ready reference for people who want to work (and play) together to make a difference in their neighborhoods.
  • We focus on communicating information that people can use to improve their neighborhoods and their relationships with their neighbors.
  • We summarize the best material that’s already out there, and try to make them more accessible (shorter, mobile-readable) and richer (f.e. by using tags & links).
  • We collect stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things for their neighborhoods. (Some of us learn better through stories than through technical stuff)
  • Theory is good, but we like practice (lessons learned, case studies, best practices).
  • We try to distill the material so as to highlight ideas that have been tested, whether they worked or not.
  • With your help, we maintain a list of online libraries and resources that are available to the public, for free.

Please help improve this resource by posting your suggestions using the form below.

Blockheads

Our Blocks is an all-volunteer effort. Our current Co-Editors:

  • Allegra Williams is a community organizer and practitioner based in the greater Boston area, where she focuses on creating and expanding community networks to improve the quality of life in neighborhoods. She recently coordinated several public art and cultural initiatives, and co-founded a homeless coalition in Lowell, Massachusetts, which advocates for policy change, alongside social service agencies and homeless residents. She earned her Masters degree in Community Social Psychology from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she works as the Program Manager of the university’s Community and Cultural Affairs Office. She organized the 2010 Innovative Cities conference.
  • Brian Fier is involved in community building and development. He is interested in information dissemination, collaboration, and improving communities. Additionally, he is developing tools for connecting people to each other and to information with the intention of helping improve communities and people’s lives. One such project is Campus Dakota where he is the President and Community Developer. Brian has a master’s and bachelor’s degree from North Dakota State University; his coursework was focused on the social sciences.
  • Christina Holt got her MA in Child Development and Psychology, and her BA in Community Leadership Development, from the University of Kansas. She’s the Associate Director for Community Tool Box Services at the KU Workgroup for Community Health & Development. Christina was a Research Associate at the KU Work Group, then served at Community Living Opportunities from 2004 to 2007, as Senior Administrator, Behavior Analyst, and Director of Behavioral Services and Family Enhancement.
  • Dan Rapson worked as Director of Construction at the Wake County Chapter of Habitat for Humanity, then the third largest affiliate in the United States. He attends Wayne State University in downtown Detroit, and is interested in developing housing and food resources in the city.
  • Hien Tran graduated from San Jose State University with a degree in International Business. Her nonprofit work started in her early college years. She worked at Catholic Charities, Charities Housing, Girls For A Change, and the International Rescue Committee. When not at work, she bakes, gardens, reads, and promotes community development.
  • Jami Jones is a graduate of Portland State University with a BS degree in Science and Community Health.  She worked as a System Analyst and IT Business Analyst in the Telecommunications Industry before serving as Information Coordinator for the Alliance for a Healthier Generation.  She currently serves as Manager of Technical Support and Training at the University of Kansas Workgroup for Community Health & Development.
  • Joseph Porcelli (@JosephPorcelli) is the Chief Executive Neighbor at NeighborsForNeighbors.org a Boston based 501c3, which operates social networks that connect people who live, work, and serve in the same neighborhood, providing them with tools to communicate and collaborate. He founded The Mug Project (winner of the 2009 Green Residential Waste Reduction Champion Award), and The Nametag Project to promote neighborliness. Joseph also worked as a Program Coordinator for the Boston Police Department, where he helped develop and maintain crime watch groups.
  • Laura Toscano (@gardenvarieties) is an Operations Manager at KaBOOM!, a national non-profit dedicated to bringing play back into the lives of our children. She’s an advocate for unstructured play, exploration, community gardening, local farms, public art, and dreaming big. Laura has a BA in Philosophy from Yale University, and blogs about helping to save one of DC’s last truly local farms as The Garden Variety Philosopher.
  • Leo Romero (@LeoRomero) majored in History and Political Science at the University of the Philippines Baguio, and did post-grad work in Business Economics at the University of Asia and the Pacific. As an organizer, he’s worked with students, workers, tribal minorities, businesses, and NGOs. His day job is in affordable housing, as Regional Manager at The John Stewart Company, where he’s focused on working families, seniors, the formerly homeless, and people with AIDS, addictions, or developmental disabilities.
  • Neal Gorenflo (@gorenflo) is the publisher of Shareable.net. A former market researcher, stock analyst, and Fortune 500 strategist, Neal left the corporate world to help people share through Internet startups, public events, and a circle of friends committed to the common good. Through this circle, Neal met those who would co-found Shareable.net with him. In addition to his work at Shareable, Neal serves on the board of nonprofits Independent Arts & Media and ForestEthics, and is a Strategy Fellow at FAS.research and a member of Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab.
  • P H Yang (@TravelFoto) is a documentarian of social causes. He was born in Hong Kong, and started his career in photography at the age of eight. Since then, he has traveled to five continents, documenting his journey in photographs. He has documented the plight of migrants and of the homeless in the US, and of  underprivileged children and migrant workers in rural China. PH supports nonprofits by, among other things, making his photographs available for exhibition, with proceeds donated to these organizations. You can check out his photography here.

While many of us work in organizations that care about communities, we don’t represent them here. Please don’t blame them for anything we might do.

Thanks to Allen Gunn of Aspiration for helping us set up and maintain this resource. And thank you Ami Dar, Arthur Coddington, Britt Bravo, Gina Cardazone, Matt Garcia, and Paul Lamb for the inspiration, guidance, and support.

Be a Blockhead

This is a new project, and we need your help. The only criterion is that you’re able to write excerpts, summaries, or syntheses of good material that’s already out there, so people who want to do something about their neighborhoods can quickly pick up proven ideas to apply. If you want to be a Blockhead, please email us using the contact form below and tell us a bit about yourself, with links to sources we can use to write your bio (your blog, Twitter feed, LinkedIn profile etc). Then register so we can give you edit rights. While waiting for us to get off our day jobs and respond to you (see why we need you?), you can read and improve upon our Style Guide.

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Please tell us a bit about yourself, and why you want to help. Thanks!

5 steps to your new community garden

in Asset-Based Community Development, community engagement, Place-based communities, Psychology

When I moved into my new apartment in Washington DC, the first thing I did was contact the two nearest community gardens to apply for a garden plot. The first replied that I was just barely outside the borders of their eligible neighborhood; the second regretfully informed me that they had no available spots, and that their waiting list was so long they had actually stopped putting people on the waiting list.

So what gives? Where can I grow some food? My windows face north. I could suspend pots from the clothesline over our building’s alley… or become a guerrilla gardener… or volunteer at a local farm… but those are topics for another post.

I know I’m not the only one in this situation. And at the same time, the availability of fresh, local, healthy produce is severely limited in many urban centers, especially in the most under-resourced neighborhoods, so we should definitely be encouraging people to grow their own food. We need more community gardens, so let’s start digging!

Why build a community garden? Because aside from all this talk of obesity epidemics and food deserts and dire predictions on food security, we need more than just access to good local produce to make this work. We need a food culture that’s tied to agriculture and a knowledge of where our food comes from. A culture that’s centered on a community gathering space to get together and swap recipes, show kids that dirt and bugs can be fun, share ideas and know-how, and ask…

“What should we do next to fix up the neighborhood?”

So here’s what you need:

(more…)

KaBOOM! – Empowering Neighborhoods and Restoring Play

in Asset-Based Community Development, community engagement, Place-based communities, Psychology

Peter Gray is a research professor of psychology at Boston College. He has conducted and published research in comparative, evolutionary, developmental, and educational psychology; published articles on innovative teaching methods and alternative approaches to education; and is author of Psychology (Worth Publishers), an introductory college textbook now in its 5th edition.

Peter Gray

In Empowering Neighborhoods and Restoring Play, Psychology Today columnist Peter Gray asked his readers to help him develop a proposal to build a neighborhood play and learning center “that could serve as a model that communities everywhere might emulate”. I said I’d help, and after putting in a few hours, recommended that he check out KaBOOM!, a nonprofit founded by Darell Hammond, who studied under John Kretzmann, Director of the Assets Based Community Development Institute (ABCD Insitute) at Northwestern University.

A 2008 study authored by Deborah Puntenney found that “when implemented appropriately, the KaBOOM! Community-Build process creates a lasting impact on the communities it partners with, both in terms of building capacity, enhancing community pride and cultivating leadership, as well as enhancing the play experience of neighborhood children.” Dr. Puntenney’s researchers conducted site visits and telephone interviews with 110 playspace builders, and reported that:

  • Nearly 100% believe that their KaBOOM! playground positively impacted the quality and quantity of children’s play
  • 94% believe that their playground project helped strengthen relationships among neighborhood residents and among community partners
  • 91% said that the KaBOOM! Community Build model and tools work

The KaBOOM! model (Road Map) comprises eight steps:

  1. KaBOOM! Road MapResearch – Why play matters, the “community-build model,” benefits of a community build model, play equipment appropriate for specific ages, abilities, and types of play, playground safety hazards in old equipment, make the case for a new, community-built playground.
  2. Conceive – Create a project vision and mission statement, form a planning committee, choose a playground site, choose a surfacing and equipment vendor, estimate the project budget, establish a project timeline, create a fundraising strategy.
  3. Organize – Organize and hold the first playspace meeting, start fundraising, finalize planning committee teams, determine the necessary site preparation, create a project website.
  4. Design – Holding a Design Day, working with an equipment vendor to select a design, press materials and media involvement, accelerating youth involvement through the Design Day and service learning projects.
  5. Coordinate – Recruiting Build Day volunteers and captains, creating a contingency plan for bad weather and emergencies, mapping the build site and the Build Day “matrix,” creating a maintenance plan with the landowner and staff, leveling the site and removing old equipment.
  6. Energize – Planning final fundraisers, writing and sending out a media advisory to notify local newspapers, radio, and TV stations, ordering side project materials, confirming delivery schedule for equipment and surfacing, training build day captains.
  7. Build – Equipment and surfacing delivery, organizing materials one to two days before the Build Day, motivating volunteers, rehearsing the ribbon cutting ceremony, taking pictures of the site and securing the area.
  8. Maintain – Sending official thanks you’s, starting your maintenance program, hosting a final planning meeting, supervising, playing and enjoying, RALLY!-ing for play.

The website’s toolkit provides resources (including samples) for every step on the map, including pre-planning, community involvement, volunteer recruitment, fundraising,  construction, and maintenance.

KaBOOM! also provides free online training, and a Project Planner: a free website that aims to help you plan each step of your project, communicate with your team, recruit local volunteers, raise money, get free advice from the professional playground builders at KaBOOM!, and connect you to a community of people like you who are building playspaces around the country.

KaBOOM! Project PlannerClick here to read news articles on KaBOOM!