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The Kaboom! Van

Yay for playgrounds! By next year, there will be a new one in Southwest, but they need 80+ volunteers to help build it (in a single day). I learned about this via Southwest: The Little Quadrant That Could:

It looks like the effort to bring a centrally-located children’s playground to SW has paid off and one is now planned for the park space adjacent to the Southwest Branch Library at 3rd & I Streets. If you recall back in April, I caught some flack from commenters after expressing my opinion (which I rarely do on this blog) about one of the proposed locations for a playground – the District-owned northeast parcel of Waterfront Station. I’m glad the selected location for the park is not on this parcel, which will cause less angst (and unnecessary expense) when the District eventually decides to allow developers to build housing and ground-floor retail on the site, and a new location for the playground would need to be found…

According to the project website, there are currently 14 volunteer members (myself included) and $5,000 has been donated so far, which is 10% of the $50,000 needed to build the park. The goal is to build the park by this time next year – November 29, 2011.

The playground is being developed with the help of KaBoom!, a neat non-profit which is headquartered in D.C. More on the group, via Wiki:

KaBOOM! is an American non-profit organization that helps communities build playgrounds for children. Darell Hammond and Dawn Hutchison founded KaBOOM! in 1996. They were inspired to start KaBOOM! after reading a story in The Washington Post about two local children who suffocated while playing in an abandoned car because they had nowhere else to play.

And here’s more about how the funding works:

KaBOOM! organizers build a playground set during a single day. The process begins about six months before the actual construction, when KaBOOM! seeks a funding partner, searches for an appropriate site and considers the economic needs of the neighborhood. About 10 weeks before the playground build, project managers visit the community and speak to children about what types and colors of playground equipment they prefer. Three different designs are drafted and the community chooses the final one. A typical playground ranges from between $70,000 and $125,000. KaBOOM! requires its local communities to raise about 10% of the cost, which Darell Hammond described as “a way of engaging the community to solve its own challenges”.

I’m thinking about volunteering to help build it, how about you? It would be fun and rewarding to create something so useful– not to mention the instant gratification of building a whole playground in just a day.