Volunteers Join Forces to Build Tampa Heights Playground

More than 200 volunteers from PNC Bank, a member of The PNC Financial Services Group Inc., the Tampa Heights Junior Civic Association, organizers from KaBOOM! and residents of the Tampa Heights community joined forces on Saturday, March 2 to build a new playground at the Tampa Heights Junior Civic Association, 2009 N. Lamar St., Tampa.

The new playground’s design is based on drawings created by children who participated in a Design Day event in December.

Today’s kids spend less time playing outside than any previous generation in part because only one in five children live within walking distance of a park or playground. KaBOOM! has been committed to giving children a place to play since 1996.

The new playground will provide more than 200 children in the Tampa Heights community with a safe place to play. Currently, the children living in the neighborhood play in streets and parking lots because there is not a safe, accessible playground within walking distance.

The playground is the 13th built by KaBOOM! with funding from The PNC Foundation, which receives primary funding from The PNC Financial Services Group Inc. It is one of more than 150 playground builds KaBOOM! will lead across the country in 2013.

In addition to the community-built playground, the new play area will include Imagination Playground in a Cart – a breakthrough playspace concept designed by architect David Rockwell to encourage child-directed, unstructured free play. With reconfigurable loose parts, Imagination Playground in a Cart allows children to constantly change their environment and design their own course of play.

The Tampa Heights Junior Civic Association is a community-based, resident-driven organization that provides youth with mentoring and support.

The playground, which will be available for use by any of the 2,000-plus youth who live in Tampa Heights, is a vital component of the Tampa Heights Health Zone.

One of the primary goals of the Health Zone is to provide healthy activities and healthy choices in an effort to address the obesity epidemic that is seen in young populations. Once completed, the Health Zone will include the community garden, the greenway path for biking and walking, exercise stations, basketball court, imagination playground and the traditional playground, a youth and community center providing educational programs, and a commercial kitchen to teach youth and families how to prepare healthy foods and to teach employment training and job readiness skills.

KaBOOM! is a national nonprofit dedicated to saving play. Entrepreneur Darell Hammond founded nonprofit KaBOOM! in 1996 in Washington, D.C., with a vision of creating a great place to play within walking distance of every child in America. Since then, KaBOOM! has mapped more than 90,000 places to play, built more than 2,200 playgrounds, and successfully advocated for play policies in hundreds of cities across the country.

KaBOOM! also provides communities with online tools to self-organize and take action to support play on both a local and national level. For more information, visit www.kaboom.org.