Building New Community Playgrounds – Grassroots Action Toolkit

Author: Austin Stanfel

In many areas, children miss a significant part of their childhood experiences. This experience has to do with playing on safe commercial playground equipment. While there could be playgrounds in your area, this does not mean that they are safe. A safe playground is essential for children, as it allows them space to make friends, be physically active, and explore.

The Grassroots Action Toolkit helps you bring new commercial playground equipment to your community. There are many simple actions recommended to help your community. A simple act like complaining to a local news page or volunteering your time at your local playground does not seem like it will do much. However, your small act could get more people to join in and create a significant change.

The Grassroots Action Toolkit also has information about how to assess and improve the local play areas. They have an easy-to-use map that you assign your local park and play-space to. This posts the play space to their map, and both you and other community members can rate and describe the overall play space and the condition of the commercial playground equipment. This rating is done with a play space audit.

The play-space audit information is one of the primary tools of the Grassroots Action Toolkit. The audit completely maps the whole play area and gives you a good idea of what needs to be done. This information provides you with what you need to advocate for better play spaces or new commercial playground equipment. The audit does not only look at one play area but can also be used to measure how all the parks in your town or city are.

Once you have completed the audit, let the community know your finding. They need to know exactly what needs to be fixed and what needs to be replaced in the commercial playground equipment. You should also include information about how all this work is going to be done. Not having an action plan in place could cause a setback and procrastination of the work.

Children should have play spaces that are safe and that have pleasant commercial playground equipment. Without these safe spaces, children and parents can choose to avoid them. A good play space allows children to run and play without their parents fearing that their child will be hurt. Time spent playing outside brings about physically active children who have more friends and are highly creative. Taking back the play spaces and ensuring that they are safe does not take a lot of work. Even the simplest action can be the one that creates change in your neighborhood and community.