Playgrounds to the people: ending the play deficit

Think about your neighborhood. Your house. The street. Does your neighborhood have a playground? If yes, you’re one of the lucky ones. And if not, well, there’s a D.C.-based non-profit whose job it is to build playgrounds. KaBOOM!! started in 1996 with two employees and a few thousand dollars in the bank. Now it is a multimillion-dollar operation with hundreds of thousands of volunteers who just build playgrounds, with a goal of having a playground within walking distance of every child in America.

Earlier this year, KaBOOM! founder Darell Hammond won the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition Lifetime Achievement Award for his efforts to save play for America’s children, and end the so-called “play deficit.” KALW’s Hana Baba spoke with Hammond to find out what the big deal is about play.

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HANA BABA: There was a moment where you say, “I have to start building the play spaces for kids.” And it has to do with an article that you read – tell me about that.

DARELL HAMMOND: Yeah, well I read an article about two young kids, Iesha and Clendon, who were two- and four-year-old brother and sister, that in a heat wave of 1996 had gone into an abandoned Pontiac Trans Am car, suffocated, and died. And a Washington Post reporter went down and spent several weeks actually surveying the community where these kids were growing up, and couldn’t find a park, a playground, a swimming pool, a basketball court within three miles of where they lived.

BABA: So they went there to play.

HAMMOND: So they went there to play because they had nowhere else to play.

BABA: So what does a playground do to a neighborhood? What is the effect, do you think?

HAMMOND: What we’ve seen a lot of times is crime generally doesn’t happen where people congregate. And the more people that start to congregate in our streets and in our parks, it drives away the less desirable elements. But it starts with having critical mass. And we have to get out of our houses, of our apartment buildings, into streets, into the parks, and into the communities – that’s the way we solve this.

We do about 200 playgrounds a year, and then we work with community organizations, and our specialty is working with charter schools, shelters, boys and girls clubs, YMCAs. And then the kids actually help design and plan it…

BABA: And that’s why you guys kind of call them “community-built playgrounds.” So the community is the one that asks you to “come into my community, and we’ll help you all the way.”

HAMMOND: That’s exactly right.

BABA: How long does it take you to build a playground? You said one day?

HAMMOND: It could take six months for the planning to get a one-day from showing up on the site at 6am, unloading the equipment off the truck, to having the holes pre-dug and augured. But to start to set the post and the platforms, and then add the components like the swings and the overhead ladders and the slides, and then concrete it, and then put your safety-surfacing, literally can be done in six to eight hours with hundreds of volunteers.

BABA: That must be quite a sight to see.

HAMMOND: It’s an amazing accomplishment, and simply the best way to describe it is, sosmebody once said it’s like watching the impossible become possible.

BABA: There’s an interactive map of play on your website where you can enter your zip code and see all the playgrounds in your area. Many were built by KaBOOM!, some weren’t, and I just want to mention some local ones built by KaBOOM!: Westlake Park in Daly City, the La Casita Playground on O’Farrell in San Francisco, and sometimes you don’t build the playground but you enhance an existing one, right? Like Toyon Park in San Leandro. And you have an annual listing which was very interesting to me: Playful City USA, an annual listing of the most playful cities in America. What makes a playful city? What do you mean by that?

HAMMOND: Well, a playful city is somebody that is looking at both the short-term and long-term strategy in approach to understanding what the current state of play is, meaning where are all types of play opportunities from courts to fields to parks and to playgrounds to walking paths, and then understanding where the gaps in quality are.

BABA: Noticeably absent from the list of playful cities are other Bay Area cities like Oakland and Richmond, where there’s a concentration of low-income communities whose children possibly need play the most but they’re not getting it – why do you think that is, and what have you found are the obstacles in building playgrounds in “less playful cities,” like Oakland or Richmond who didn’t make your list?

HAMMOND: Well sometimes I think we as a society view play as a luxury, not a necessity. People need to understand that it’s through play that kids build the social skills, the muscular development, the creativity – it’s really demonstrated through play you build the social connections and the sense of adaptability and creativity to solve the world’s problems. And it’s not a luxury, it’s an absolute necessity.

BABA: These days, First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign is the campaign dujour to get kids outside and playing – is there any partnership today with that program? It seems right up your alley.

HAMMOND: Yeah, we actually had the First Lady a year ago here in San Francisco. She helped build a playground.

MICHELLE OBAMA: For the last 14 years, KaBOOM! has been building playgrounds in underserved communities, and their vision is to have great places for kids to play within walking distance of their homes.

BABA: First Lady Michelle Obama was at Bret Harte Elementary School in San Francisco at the opening of its KaBOOM!-built playground back in 2009. So, what do you like to play?

HAMMOND: I’m a free type of play person – I can still build a massive pop-up playground with cardboard boxes with my nieces and nephews. I like to be in nature. I love the sound of a stream and water, and I want my nephews and nieces to experience that as well. You know, we want to save play and the way that we can save play is to go online and check out our website, and then go offline into our parks, at our playgrounds, have fun, and then come back and tell other people about what the state of play is in your community so that we can try and improve it.

BABA: I think you say, “End the play deficit.”

HAMMOND: End the play deficit, now!

Find out where your nearest playground is by entering your zip code at the KaBOOM! website.