Building a KaBOOM! playground might be a project that you, or somebody you know, is inspired to launch in your community. The organization provides a model for how to motivate citizens who want to find a way to make the world a better place.

Why build a playground? Many communities lack safe playgrounds that meet the developmental needs of youth, restore the joy of play for children, and provide meeting and recreation space for teens, adults, and seniors.

Moreover, the act of organizing construction of a playground grooms community leaders who learn the skills and gain the experience needed to

Darrell Hammond

become changemakers, community residents gain various other skills, social connections are forged and a community's spirit and political strength grows as a result. This process triggers what Hammond calls "cascading steps of courage."

By learning that it's possible to build a playground, one step at a time, neighborhood residents gain confidence and the wherewithal to become the architects of their own dreams for a better world, without having to reinvent the wheel, Hammond said. "First it's a playground, then it can be a stoplight, a grocery store, and then mentors in the schools."

The Bryn Mawr Elementary School in Chicago suffered from low parent participation in its PTA until community residents organized to build a KaBOOM! playground. "Now participation in their annual clean up day is a highlight of parental involvement in their community," Hammond said.

Because KaBOOM! is the longest-running nonprofit organization specializing in linking communities and businesses to build safe and accessible playgrounds, it is a master teacher of the process with much experience to draw from. KaBOOM! has helped build 607 playgrounds and improved 1,300 more in the nine years since it was founded.

Playground designers and manufacturers may possess this expertise, but they offer it for sale only one project at a time without freely spreading their competencies and capacity. In the spirit of the information age, KaBOOM! measures its success by how fast it can give away knowledge that it has accumulated.

"Frankly, the only entrepreneurial thing that we've done is to collect the 607 stories in a recipe and allow other people to have it," Hammond said. "They don't have to come to us for the secret formula. Not only do we encourage people to imitate us, we give them every step of how to do it. If they can copy it and disseminate it, or do it even bigger and better, that's a fabulous thing.

Hammond likens KaBOOM!'s strategy of encouraging replication to the spread of wildflowers. "We've trained just over 1,000 communities across the country to replicate our model themselves," he said. "Last year 400,000 people visited our Web site and 13,000 people downloaded the free Getting Started Kit.

KaBOOM! offers a template — a highly detailed road map of milestones, standards, and strategies. Yet it holds the reins loosely, seeking to meet each community playground group in the middle ground, blending the community's ideas and requirements with KaBOOM!'s model.

"At one point, I did a search on Google and found out that there were over two million apple pie recipes. When we think about nonprofit organizations, sometimes we think there is only one way to build a house and that is Habitat for Humanity. And that there is one way to build a playground, and that's KaBOOM! I want to resist that by saying 'KaBOOM! provides a base line model that meets people where they are at'."

By this, Hammond means going beyond building high-quality places for children's play and community recreation to build a sense of place within a community. "In many of these places, the population is so transient that there is no sense of shared history," he said.

"We've got people who might not trust each other — who may not like each other and who may have differences of opinion about where to place the playground, about funding — some may ask, 'why are we letting corporation X fund it, because all corporations are bad?' — and about their own capacity. We are about creating a dialogue among these people and creating the experience of having a shared success.

KaBOOM!'s model is structured to enable a community group to achieve a series of small victories, enabling what Hammond calls "cascading steps of courage."

"It's possible to make the cynics go away," he said, "to make disbelief disappear and the impossible appear before our eyes."

"I think of Hunters Point in San Francisco. When I went back to a community meeting five years after the playground had been built, I knew — and some of the community residents knew — that many of the people who were at this fifth year anniversary party weren't even living in the community when the playground was built.

"Yet when the organizers asked how many had been there to build the playground, three-fourths of the hands went up. Part of it was that people had heard the story and had convinced them that they were part of this. There is no doubt that this is a psychological thing. We have to demonstrate that success is possible."

KaBOOM!'s tools for guiding persons who want to organize the construction of a playground in their community follows the metaphor of preparing to take a road trip. There are eight milestones to reach over a seven-month period, culminating in a dramatic "done-in-a-day" complete construction of a playground.

Community organizers are urged to keep to the time frame rather than succumb to the temptation to extend it in order to try to raise more funds for a larger project, "because then the time frame can go on indefinitely," Hammond said. "You've got to keep to the core principles of a definable project on a definable timetable."

Clearly defining a project with a limited time frame enables participants to feel they are embarking on "cascading steps of courage," Hammond said. "If you laid out all of the steps toward improving a neighborhood at one time, it would seem daunting and undoable." This way, participants gain a sense of a shared accomplishment — creating a shared space — and begin to exude pride in their ability to achieve a victory.

While managing the project, organizers must talk about the planned finished product to motivate people to endorse their vision. "But you've got to break it up into bite-sized pieces, and then celebrate your successes along the way" to avoid making people feel overwhelmed by the task, Hammond said.

Hammond offers some strategic tips for those who want to organize a playground construction project. First, build to a high standard of design with quality materials. "Playgrounds have become a commodity — it is all about getting playground at the cheapest cost. But building a playground that has low play quality is going to fail, even if you have great community involvement, because the kids are going to not use it and it's not going to pass the test of time.

Hammond recommends starting fundraising efforts by seeking small donations from a large number of people. "I tell communities that it's harder to get $100 from one person than it is to get $1 from 100 people, and they don't believe it so they go after the $100." But collecting small donations first will create a large base of constituents that you can talk about when you are ready to approach a large benefactor, he said.

"Another example involves a project that was being organized and had $350 in the bank. We convinced them — on a leap of faith — to do a spaghetti dinner and charge only 25 cents. They said, 'Are you people crazy?'

"We coach people to realize that it is within their ability to have a success, and we give them the know-how. Frankly, it's no different than not being a plumber but getting the courage from a how-to book to do things from simply replacing a garbage disposal in a sink to redoing a bathroom — and then going into a Home Depot and getting the supplies.

"Community change is no different. This produces cascading steps of courage that become a powerfully addictive drug. I know that of the 607 playgrounds that we have built today, if we had let the community give up probably 80 percent of them would have. But getting them to the build is the magical thing. Then they turn around and it's almost as if they never doubted themselves in the first place."

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