How I Gave Back to My Local Community This Summer

Jennifer Landis - 18 Jun 18

Summer is all about vacations and trips to the beach, and the warm weather makes it the perfect time to get outside. Unfortunately, the only playgrounds for my kids to play on in my area were locked up behind chain-link fences once the school closed for summer vacation.

Sometimes, all I want is to let the kids run rampant while I park myself beneath a tree with a good book, but I can’t do that if there are no safe places for them to play. With that in mind, I decided to nix our beach trip this summer in favor of giving back to my community — even if that meant browbeating the city planners until they built us a safe playground for our children.

Plans and Speculations

Before I even started approaching city officials, I wanted to make sure I had all my ducks in a row — and that included having potential locations lined up for the playground, as well as designs for the kind of playground that would work best in those locations. I contacted property owners to see who would be on board and who didn’t want to sell their properties for use as a playground.

I also had to design the playground, which turned out to be a lot of fun. The most important thing to remember is to create places where all kids can play, so my goal was to design an ADA-compliant playground so children of all abilities in our community could enjoy playing with their peers.

I also looked at some of the nearby playgrounds for inspiration. While they were too far away for us to benefit from or think about adding to, they were an excellent source of ideas for the playground I was designing.

Polling the Constituents

The next step was talking to my neighbors. If you are building a case for a new playground, it’s essential to get buy-in from your neighbors and assess the demand for a public playground in your community. In my situation, with a nearby elementary and middle school, I had a ton of parents that were happy to sign on almost as soon as I asked, pledging money, construction materials and building assistance.

Depending on your community, you might be as lucky as I was, or you might find yourself having to convince your neighbors a playground could be beneficial to your community. If it’s something that would be good for your neighborhood, don’t give up — sometimes people just need a little bit of convincing.

Securing Funding

Here is where it starts to get complicated. You can’t build a new playground or buy the property you need to build it on without funding. There are a few places you can look, including:

• Grants — There are plenty of community-building grants available, but finding them can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Look for local, state and federal grants.
• Crowdfunding — Crowdfunding can be a great way to raise money from your local community — just make sure you’ve crossed all your T’s and dotted all your I’s, and keep track of every receipt and donation.
• Local businesses — Talk to locally owned businesses. Many of them would jump at the chance to sponsor a new playground. Not only is it good PR for them, but it can also help them attract new customers, especially if they’re near the area where you are building the playground.

Once you’ve got your funding secured, even if you haven’t collected a single dollar yet, you still have one last step before you can break ground — talking to the bureaucrats.

Navigating the Bureaucracy

Now, it’s time to start talking to the people in charge — which is why you want to have all your ducks in a row first. Your local officials are extremely busy, and you owe it to them to keep that in mind. Don’t get on their bad side by wasting their time — that might cause your project to fail before you can ever get it off the ground.

Again, I got lucky — my local representative was a dad himself, so it wasn’t hard to convince him of the benefits of building a new playground. Having all the information in hand didn’t hurt my case, either.

After a couple of meetings, we finally agreed on a location and design, and I started collecting the promised funds.

Breaking Ground

The playground won’t be ready until next spring, especially if winter weather slows us down — but, by the beginning of June, we had broken ground and started construction. I even got the chance to break the first ground when the project started, which will go down as one of the defining moments of my life.

Our playground will serve my children and every other child in this neighborhood for decades to come, and I am so proud to have been part of making it a reality. You can do the same for your community — it takes some hard work and persistence, but it is worth it in the long run.

Jennifer Landis

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