Prospectus 2009 - Elm Playlot

Revitalizing Urban Playgrounds to Foster Child Development and Transform Communities

PURPOSE, VISION, AND STRATEGIC ROADMAP MAY 2009

Tood y Maher Founder / Director POGO PARK 2604 Roosevelt Avenue Richmond, CA 94804-1623 (510) 215-5500 Phone (510) 215-5600 Fax (510) 590-1716 Mobile toody@pogopark.org

BACKGROUND There are lots of great things happening in Richmond. The new mayor, city and finance managers, parks superintendent, and police chief bring a “can-do” attitude to Richmond and a will to tackle ambitious and difficult projects: “greening” the city, paying off the city’s budget deficit, and reinvesting in long-delayed community infrastructure. Rosie the Riveter/Home Front National Historic Park in Richmond is our nation’s newest national park. Richmond has completed 24.5 miles of the Bay Trail (the 500 mile trail that circles the Bay)––more than any other city. There are deeply rooted, active community groups in every one of Richmond’s 37 neighborhoods.

Still, there is much to be done. I want to be part of the change that is happening here in Richmond, the city where I live.

My name is Toody Maher. I’ve been so concerned by the sorry state of children’s playgrounds in public parks in Richmond that I am determined to do something about it. For communities, playgrounds in public parks are power centers; they are energetic hubs of community life. In them, we create a vital space where parents connect, children play, and families come together and forge social bonds. Parks reflect their community: a vibrant park means a vibrant community. A broken park means a broken community.

The quality of a park is a barometer of the value cities place on their citizens.

On bright, sunny days in Richmond, I drive through neighborhoods chock-full of children and can’t find a single child or family playing in their local park. Instead, I find the surface of the park’s plastic play equipment sprayed from top-to-bottom with graffiti and tagged with menacing gang slogans, its grounds littered with broken glass, trash, and hypodermic needles, and its spaces occupied by people who probably should be somewhere else, doing something else. There is little joy in these city parks and scant sense of hope. They are emblematic of Richmond today: struggling to emerge from decades of mismanagement, environmental degradation, under-funded and beleaguered schools, violence, gangs, and poverty.

The latest pediatric research points convincingly to the critical and essential role of play in child development. In order to develop, children must have a rich play environment in which to play. With this in mind, we aim to re-imagine and re-build these city parks as a way to to intervene in the lives of Richmond’s youngest children by providing them with the opportunity to experience an enriched and stimulating play experience––comparable to what middle class kids enjoy––specifically designed to foster their individual development. Creating a thoughtful, magical, high-quality play space for Richmond kids can serve as a powerful public health intervention that can help to break the cycle of low-achievement, passivity, obesity, and alienation in our youngest, most vulnerable, and at-risk citizens: our children.

New research also suggests that an effective way to revitalize a community is to revitalize its parks. The goal of this project is to do just that: to transform individual neighborhoods in Richmond by transforming their small parks into safe, vibrant, and hopeful public spaces that enable a worn and frightened community to emerge from behind locked doors.

PROJECT: THE RENOVATION OF ELM PLAYLOT

In the very heart of Richmond’s troubled and struggling Iron Triangle neighborhood, there is a small park built for small children called “Elm Playlot.” Elm Playlot is a potential neighborhood jewel. It’s intimate yet spacious. In a neighborhood with virtually no trees, Elm Playlot boasts a magnificent stand of five, mature sycamore trees, planted in a circle. Some have joked that this extraordinary collection of trees, is the “old growth forest” of the Iron Triangle. Most striking, Elm Playlot is located at the epicenter of a densely-packed neighborhood, chock-full of thousands of this country’s most vulnerable, at-risk children.

OUR PROJECT: The City of Richmond has given Pogo Park the “green light” and will provide 100% of the capital costs to completely re-think, re-design, and re-build Elm Playlot from the ground up. This is a one-of-akind opportunity to wipe the slate clean, start over, and create a park, an everyday playspace, designed to intervene into the lives of low-income, minority, under-served children by creating a safe and stimulating place for them to play. We are employing the most visionary ideas and best practices of great children’s play spaces from around the world in order to create a new model for a children’s park that can be replicated in other city parks in Richmond and beyond.

WHO WE ARE: Pogo Park is an entrepreneurial, grass-roots, community organization and “Project” of the Tides Center, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Pogo Park was founded in 2007 and is based in Richmond, California.

OUR MISSION: To transform lives by transforming public space.

OUR GOALS: By re-imagining and re-building Elm Playlot, we have four goals:

1) To create an imaginative, natural, outdoor play environment that is specifically designed to spark and foster the physical, social, cognitive, creative, and linguistic development of children; 2) To use the revitalization of Elm Playlot as a catalyst to revitalize the surrounding community; 3) To transform the park into a vibrant community hub; 4) To create a model for a new kind of park that can be replicated in other city parks in Richmond and beyond.

THE NEED: According to the 2000 Census, there are 1,777 children, age 0-5, and 2,988 children, age 0-9, who live in the Iron Triangle neighborhood, within walking distance of Elm Playlot. One in every three of these children lives below the poverty line. Virtually all are kids of color (89% percent of children age 0-5 are AfricanAmerican or Latino). These children come from working class and immigrant families with parents who are underemployed. For many Latino children, English is their second language.

Accounting for 20% of this City’s homicides, the Iron Triangle is considered Richmond’s most dangerous neighborhood. The Iron Triangle is a “food desert:” there’s an abundance of stores selling liquor and cigarettes, but virtually no stores selling fresh fruits and vegetables.

The Iron Triangle is adjacent to Chevron’s Richmond’s refinery, which spews toxins into the air and into the lungs of children of this neighborhood, and is the probable cause of the highest rates of asthma among children in the county. Because children of the Iron Triangle live in a violent and profoundly unhealthy environment, they suffer disproportionately from a myriad of health problems including ADD, diabetes, obesity, malnutrion, and asthma.

Although Elm Playlot is situated in the middle of this neighborhood, surrounded by children who have the greatest need for an outdoor place to play, this park is rarely used. There are numerous reasons why.

Elm Playlot is dangerous: it’s a magnet for people who deal drugs, take drugs, shoot guns, dump trash, drink, and train pit bulls to fight. Elm Playlot is dirty: the park is peppered with hypodermic needles, gun casings, broken glass, used condoms, dog feces, litter and debris. Elm Playlot is dull: it offers children very little to do (on a 21,000 square foot lot, there’s one, awkward, plastic play structure and one set of swings). Elm Playlot is disconnected from the community: it lacks the magical and essential “sense of place” that reflects the uniqueness of a particular community and binds residents together.

Because there’s a lack of parks in the Iron Triangle that provide its children with a safe, stimulating, and soulful outdoor place to play, parents keep their kids inside. Meanwhile, as the Trust for Public Land writes in their paper Benefit of Parks: “A generation of children is growing up indoors, locked into a deadened life of television and video games, alienated from the natural world and its life-affirming benefits.”

New Research on Brain Development in Young Children There are thousands of children in Richmond no meaningful or safe place to play; 20% of Richmond children, age 0-9, live in the Iron Triangle. The concept of a “meaningful” play space is a direct result of groundbreaking neurological research in the ‘90’s that revealed that children’s brains develop at a phenomenal rate, far faster than anyone ever imagined possible. In fact, the neural pathways––the “architecture of the brain”––that govern a child’s entire cognitive, linguistic, social, physical, and creative development are “hard-wired” early in life, especially during a child’s first five years. Most importantly, the research reveals that free play is the most effective and proven method to hard-wire a child’s brain for healthy development.

“All healthy mammals play.”

Dr. Joe Frost, Professor Emeritus of Child Development, University of Texas Playing is how young children learn. When kids negotiate the rules of the playground (who gets on the slide first, how long is fair to spin on the rubber tire, how to resolve disputes) they are, in fact, developing social skills.

When they don costumes and pretend they’re Cinderella, a scary monster, or a Power Ranger, they are developing creative skills. When they swing on a swing, slide down a slide, or climb up a ladder, they are developing physical skills. When they construct a small fort out of mud, stone, and sticks, they are developing cognitive skills and so forth. Play is the “mother’s breast milk” of activity: it provides a child with rich, meaningful, supercharged opportunities to practice the very developmental skills they need to develop to their inherent potential.

This new research that pinpoints the critical role of play on child development has completely turned playground design on its head. Experts in child development tell us that traditional playgrounds that feature plastic, standardized, off-the-shelf, play equipment fail dismally to meet children’s developmental needs. These static play structures provide opportunities for “physical” play only; research shows that children must have “varied” play opportunities (i.e. ever-changing and challenging) to grow and thrive: a chance to engage in “creative” play (e.g. dress up and make-believe), “social” play (e.g. group games) and “cognitive” play (e.g. problem-solving a building project). Traditional playgrounds have other glaring problems as well: they are overly safe, lack a connection with nature, do not provide communities with a “sense of place,” and rarely include unique equipment or a protected space for toddlers (age 0-2).

New Thinking on Playground Design As an alternative, new, forward-thinking parks are being designed and built to provide children with more “meaningful” play opportunities. A good example of this new thinking is the proposed Burling Slip playground in lower Manhattan, a result of a $2 million “public-private” partnership with the city of New York and a local nonprofit organization. Burling Slip playground, scheduled to be built in spring 2010, will feature “loose parts” ––foam blocks, and a collection of tubing, elbows, and gaskets––that children can use to manipulate and build whatever they imagine. A “playworker” (someone trained in how to create rich, ever-changing play opportunities for children) will staff Burling Slip.

Up to the present, the niche for meaningful play environments in this country has been filled primarily by “payfor-play” options that include discovery museums, water parks, zoos, summer camps, organized sports, private music, dance, and art classes. These private options are magnets for middle and upper class families who will pay whatever price is required to ensure their children are exposed to the “varied” play opportunities experts agree are essential to child development. But for those kids who cannot afford to “pay for play,” oftentimes their sole play option is the playground in their public park.

Writing in a September 2007 op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle, UC Berkeley public policy professor David Kirp wrote, “Research shows the possibility of having a profound impact on [poor] children’s lives by giving them a shot at the stimulating world that middle-class youngsters routinely inhabit.” Children in Richmond’s Iron Triangle neighborhood needs and deserves exactly this opportunity right here––right now––in their own neighborhood. Despite the odds, we’re at a tipping point where it can actually happen. Building a firstclass park in the center of this depressed neighborhood for these vulnerable kids sends a profound message to all Iron Triangle children that says: “We value you. We are investing in you. You matter.”

DESIGN VISION FOR ELM PLAYLOT

To create a new model for a new kind of city park, we are employing the most visionary ideas and best practices of great children’s play spaces from around the world. After two years of research, we have distilled the best thinking, designs, and practices of great playgrounds into “5 Essential Elements:”

5 ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS:

1. Staff the Park

Elm Playlot will be staffed by a “Park Host” whose job is: a) to function as a “playleader” or “playworker” (standard in thousands of European parks) who provides rich and meaningful play opportunities for children; b) to watch over the park with the same care as that of a loving parent.

The Park Host ensures that Elm Playlot is safe, inviting, and clean. The Park Host unlocks and open the gates in the morning and closes and lock the gates at night.

We intend to recruit, train, and hire Iron Triangle residents to become Park Hosts of Elm Playlot. As the renovation of Elm Playlot is imminent, employing residents to staff their own neighborhood park serves as a home-grown stimulus plan.

2. Provide Rich Play Opportunities for Children

Typical playgrounds are “static” and designed for physical play only; research shows that playgrounds must provide children with ever-changing opportunities to engage in other, critical types of play: creative, cognitive, linguistic and social play.

To this end, Elm Playlot is being designed to offer children dynamic and “varied” play opportunities to meet their play needs. For example, Elm Playlot will offer swings, slides, spinners, balancing rocks and overhead ladders to encourage a child’s physical development. Elm Playlot will offer “loose parts” (blocks, fabrics, sticks, sand and water) to give children a chance to build whatever they imagine to foster their creative development.

Elm Playlot will offer the “Global Village,” a series of child-sized replicas of houses from around the world (tipi, log cabin, yurt, mud huts and tree house) where children can imagine and pretend, fostering their creative, linguistic and social development.

The heart our design vision is to create a natural, outdoor play environment that can better connect children to the wonders of the natural world. Elm Playlot will feature a large sandbox filled with large wooden spoons, sieves, shovels, buckets, and the finest, cleanest sand and water to make sandcastles. Elm Playlot will feature a butterfly garden, an edible landscape (i.e. the fence covered with all types of berries), fallen trees, dirt, rocks, sand, and mud.

We will stage daily and weekly community events at Elm Playlot. For instance, on Thursday afternoons, Elm Playlot can offer “Art in the Park” when both children and their parents can sit, side-by-side, painting, drawing, and coloring. Every day, Elm Playlot will use the small amphitheater to read or tell stories (mirroring the books local children are reading at their school, Peres Elementary, four blocks away).

3. Provide Basic Amenities

Elm Playlot will offer basic amenities: comfortable seating, ample shade, a clean bathroom, running water, everchanging play activities, and affordable, healthy snacks.

4. Function as a Community Hub

At Elm Playlot, we will create a public, common space in which other city and local agencies can use to provide direct services and programs to residents. For example, the Richmond library can park their “Bookmobile” at the curb of Elm Playlot on Friday afternoons. Families can return their old books and check out new ones.

The librarian can come to Elm Playlot every day to read books to children from the “storyteller” chair in our amphitheater. Kaiser Permanente could bring their mobile health to Elm Playlot the first Saturday of the month to provide free vaccines for children or blood pressure tests for parents.

Richmond’s para-transit vans could shuttle our senior citizens to and from Elm Playlot to act as volunteers to rake and remove debris from the sand or simply to sit in the park and pass the day listening to the delightful sounds of children playing. Richmond’s Eco-Village could sell their local-grown fruit and vegetables from carts or at Elm Playlot’s weekly (or daily!) farmers market. The City’s Recreation Department could lead exercise classes for residents at Elm Playlot.

Students at East Bay Center for the Performing Arts could sing, dance, and stage plays at Elm Playlot’s––at special events on summer nights.

5. Ensure That the Park is Safe

To succeed, Elm Playlot must be safe. To achieve this end, we will do what they do in the great parks of London, Paris, and New York: install a tall, decorative, see-through fence around the circumference of the playlot, with a single, lockable gate at the entrance. The Park Host opens the gates each morning to the public and locks the gates at night to protect it from vandals. At Elm Playlot today, there is a pervasive sense of imminent danger.

At any moment, Elm Playlot can be overrun by loose dogs, men who come there to drink, deal drugs or loiter.

To take back this park from the negative forces and return it to the community, staffing Elm Playlot with a security guard––anytime the park is open––must be considered.

EVALUATION By completely transforming Elm Playlot, we have four goals: to 1) foster child development; 2) revitalize the community; 3) transform the park into a community hub and 4) create a model for a new kind of park that can be replicated in Richmond and in thousands of city parks beyond.

To measure our progress in achieving these goals, we have partnered with Dr. June Tester and Dr. Irene Yen, from UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health and UCSF respectively. Drs. Tester and Yen received a $150,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to measure specific metrics to determine if and how the renovation of Elm Playlot impacts community health. This first research project is happening now. In this study, Drs. Tester and Yen are taking “before” and “after” snapshots that measure: 1) if children come to renovated Elm Playlot more than they did before; 2) if children move more and 3) if and how the renovation of this Elm Playlot leads to increased neighborhood cohesion. The results of this study can have an impact on the need for better play environments for at-risk youth across the country.

KEY EVENTS Obtaining Support from the City of Richmond We took our vision for a new kind of park at Elm Playlot to the City of Richmond. We met and gained support from Mayor Gayle McLaughlin, City Manager Bill Lindsay, Parks Superintendent Tony Norris, Finance Director Jim Goines, members of the City Council, the Richmond Parks Commission, and the Iron Triangle Neighborhood Council. There is a tremendous will and entrepreneurial spirit among city officials to do something radically different with the playlots in order to address the glaring need for better play environments for Richmond children. To follow is a synopsis of the collaborative support we have received from the City to date: PARKS DEPARTMENT: From the beginning, Parks Superintendent, Tony Norris, championed Pogo Park's vision for

renovating Richmond's playlots. Mr. Norris opened all kinds of door for us and his department has pledged $120,000 towards the renovation of the next playlot Pogo Park intends to renovate, Solano Playlot.

COMMUNITY REDEVELOPMENT AGENCY: The land-use division of the City's Redevelopment Agency awarded a

contract of $37,500 to Urban Ecology design the park for Pogo Park. Most notably, they pledged 100% of the capital costs to re-build Elm Playlot, roughly $400,000. We are working with Redevelopment project director, Chad Smalley, and Alan Wolken, the director of Redevelopment Agency's land-use division.

Patrick Lynch, the Community Redevelopment Agency’s Housing Director, has committed a portion of the $3.3 million the city received from HUD to purchase and re-hab a series of blighted, vacant houses that surround Elm playlot and transform them into affordable housing for Iron Triangle residents. Mr. Lynch also pledged to provide additional funding, as it becomes available, to continue to purchase all 20 boarded-up, vacant homes on 8th Street, the street that borders Elm playlot. We estimate 20 homes @ $160,000 (purchase cost + re-hab = $3.2 million) CITY MANAGER: City Manager Bill Lindsay is personally involved and supportive of the Pogo Park project and has

instructed us to contact him if ever our project stalls. To date, we have not needed to as all city staff are supporting Pogo Park's plans to re-build Elm Playlot.

PUBLIC WORKS: City Manager Lindsay expressed interest in upgrading the streetscapes that border Elm Playlot. The

upgrades will probably include new street surfacing, sidewalks, traffic calming, tree planting and possibly moving all utility wires underground. We estimate these improvements will cost roughly $150,000.

CITY COUNCIL: In March 2008, Richmond’s city council voted 9-0 to direct city staff to work with Pogo Park to

fundraise and to direct the city to issue a letter of support for the project. Pogo Park has met individually with 5 of the current 7 members of the city council; all are supportive and helpful at every step of the way –– especially new city councilmember Dr. Jeff Ritterman and Mayor McGlaughlin.

RECREATION DEPARTMENT: We are working with Recreation Director, Keith Jabari, to imagine how to include

some of the city's recreation programs at Elm Playlot––and how to export Pogo Park programs to other city parks.

POLICE DEPARTMENT: We are working with Michelle Milan, community affairs director, and Captain Brown, the police officer who is responsible for the Iron Triangle, to coordinate resources so that Elm playlot and the surrounding streets are safe places for children and families.

OFFICE OF NEIGHBORHOOD SAFETY: We are working directly and collaboratively with ONS director Devone Boggan and his staff who are charged with finding ways to reduce gang violence and in the Iron Triangle.

In short, all key departments in the city of Richmond have pledged a significant investment in both capital and city resources to prove they are a willing and committed partner in the project to re-build Elm Playlot into a new model for a city park.

Gathering Community Input To gather input from residents for how Elm Playlot should be and could be transformed, we used a community input process called “Photovoice.” Joe Griffin, a PHD student in public health from UC Berkeley––born and raised less than a mile from Elm Playlot––suggested using it. The goal of Photovoice is to use the powerful combination of photos and voices to dig deeper into the psyche of a community and illuminate what lies below the surface.

In the summer of 2008, Joe volunteered his time to lead us and a group of 15 Iron Triangle residents (comprised of 6 African-Americans, 8 Latinos + 1 Asian) through the Photovoice community input process. We met every Saturday morning at the Nevin Community Center for five weeks. We gave each participant two sets of cameras and instructed them to take pictures of the things they like about their neighborhood and its parks, the things they didn’t like, and the things they wished to see. Then, we sat with the participants, reviewed their pictures, and recorded their voices as they described why they took the pictures they did, and what these pictures tell us.

The partial results of Photovoice can be viewed by typing this link into a web browser: http://web.me.com/toodym/PhotoVoice_Elm/Home.html Photovoice quickly illuminated many critical issues and challenges that must be addressed for Elm Playlot to become a place that children and families can visit everyday. These include: * * * * * * * * * * * *

Stop the drug dealing at the house that sits directly across from the playlot Stop the vagrants from using the park to drink, deal drugs, and take drugs Stop the vandals from destroying the play equipment and tagging the sycamore trees with graffiti Stop the practice of using the park to fight dogs or to train dogs to fight Clean up the sea of blight from the porches, lawns and driveways of boarded-up homes, streets, and vacant lots Transform the abandoned, vacant house surrounding Elm playlot into homes for resident families Provide better street lighting Get the police out of their cars to patrol the streets of the Iron Triangle on foot or bike Offer better recreational, cultural, and artistic opportunities for youth Remove advertising for liquor on billboards near schools and parks Shut down neighborhood liquor stores Create a place where the community can come together

The results of this Photovoice project guide our efforts today.

WHERE POGO PARK STANDS TODAY The transformation of Elm Playlot is catalyzing other changes in the immediate neighborhood: VACANT HOUSES THAT SURROUND ELM PLAYLOT . The Photovoice project (described above) illuminates why Elm Playlot is rarely used today. Facing Elm is a drug-dealer’s house where drugs are sold day in, day out. Surrounding this house, and surrounding Elm playlot, are roughly 20 boarded-up, vacant, and blighted homes. Every day, people come to the drug house to buy drugs, go next door to a vacant house to use the drugs, and then spill out into the park. The presence of men loitering in Elm Playlot is a formidable barrier to children’s use of the park.

From residents’ input, we realized that Elm Playlot would not, and could not, succeed unless we dealt––head-on––with the vacant homes that surround the park and with the problems they magnetize. To this end, we spent seven months assembling a collaborative comprised of the Redevelopment Agency, the police department, and two nonprofit organizations who are developers of affordable housing – Community Housing Development Corporation North Richmond and Richmond Housing Services. As a result, the City’s Community Redevelopment Agency’s housing director, Patrick Lynch, has committed to buy ALL the vacant homes that surround Elm Playlot and to work closely with the two The yellow squares represent the boarded-up and vacant houses surrounding Elm Playlot nonprofit developers to acquire, re-hab, and transform these vacant, blighted homes into affordable housing for resident families. The source of funding for the acquisition of these houses comes from the federal government, both through the stimulus and through $3.3 million that was recently awarded by HUD to Richmond to improve the City’s blighted neighborhoods. The attempt to acquire some of these homes is underway.

PERES ELEMENTARY SCHOOL : We intend to work closely with Peres Elementary School, located four blocks away, to support, connect, and mirror the school’s programming with the programming at Elm Playlot. By working together, Pogo Park at Elm Playlot and Peres Elementary School can maximize our collective impact.

We catalyze each other’s efforts to create positive, healthy, learning environments that make it possible for children of the Iron Triangle to grow, thrive, and reach their inherent potential.

YELLOW BRICK ROAD : Recently, a group of youth who live in the Iron Triangle imagined how to safely connect and link key assets of their community (i.e. churches, parks, schools) together via the “Yellow Brick Road.”

The Yellow Brick Road is a pathway––a walkway and bikeway––that is marked by bright, yellow “bricks” stenciled directly onto public sidewalks and across roads. The aim of the Yellow Brick Road is to both designate and create “safe routes” for everyone in the community to safely walk to and from some of the “energetic hubs” and “power spots” that define the Iron Triangle neighborhood: Peres Elementary School, Nevin Community Center, Kaiser Hospital, St. Mark’s Church, Brookside Hospital, the Peace Garden, East Bay Center for the Performing Arts, the Richmond Greenway, and Elm Playlot.

LUCAS PARK . Four blocks north of Elm Playlot is Lucas Park, a large park with a basketball and tennis court. Residents want children of all ages to have a safe place to play, and, since Elm Playlot is a small park designed for small children, Elm Playlot cannot accommodate the play needs of children of every age.

Over the past two years, we have been in contact with the Trust for Public Land (TPL), a national nonprofit that conserves and renovates land for parks, gardens and other natural places. We organized a meeting with TPL, Richmond’s Community Redevelopment Agency, the Police Department, and the Parks Superintendent. TPL is interested in raising the funds and then leading the effort to renovate Lucas Park; we will know by July if this will happen. If TPL comes to Richmond to develop Lucas Park (using many of the play elements and programming created by Pogo Park at Elm Playlot), three parks in three years will have undergone a complete renovation in the Iron Triangle neighborhood. Connected by the Yellow Brick Road, we can create an “archipelago of safe parks” where children can play freely and parents can gather in peace.

Lucas Park, the largest park in the Iron Triangle

THE CALIFORNIA ENDOWMENT: The renovation of Elm Playlot comes at an auspicious time. Recently, the Cali-

fornia Endowment (TCE), California’s richest health foundation, selected Richmond as one of 14 cities in its 10year, new strategic effort, “Building Healthy Communities.” This new and powerful strategic direction came about because TCE found that they “could maximize the impact of our funding by targeting a specific number of communities to address directly the root causes and systems that impact the health of Californians the most” (“Building Healthy Communities” Initiative,The California Endowment, March 2009).

TCE will focus all its Richmond work on only 2 of the City’s 32 neighborhoods: Iron Triangle and North Richmond. From our conversations with TCE to date, we are confident that they will be a significant, long-term, sustaining partner and supporter of Pogo Park.

PLAY EXPERTS: We have connected and partnered with many organizations, both in this country and abroad, to

employ the latest thinking on the how children’s free play can profoundly effect their development. A highlights of some of these groups include: * Penny Wilson of LondonPlays, one of the leading, most experienced “playworkers” in England who directs and designs programming for 80 adventure playgrounds in London * Jon Pape, Director of Parks in Copenhagen, Denmark and visionary in creating some of the world’s most innovative play spaces * Joan Almon and Ed Miller of the nonprofit advocacy group, Alliance for Childhood, who are working on the policy level to bring play back into schools * Dr. Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play and author of “Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul” * Gina Moreland, founder and director of Habitot’s Children’s Museum in Berkeley

A WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY Because the City of Richmond has agreed to “green light” this new park concept and then pay to build it, we have a one-of-a-kind opportunity to wipe the slate clean and to do something amazing. We have a shot at creating an innovative, forward-thinking public park that can immediately and profoundly affect the everyday quality of life for the children and families who live in Richmond’s Iron Triangle neighborhood.

Elm Playlot

We have access to and the support of some of this country’s most innovative thinkers about play and playgrounds. They are interested in sharing their knowledge and helping to guide us to transform Elm Playlot into a model for a city park can be replicated elsewhere.

The support from the City of Richmond is contingent upon Pogo Park raising the funds to finish the park design, create the play programming, and then operate Elm Playlot. Otherwise, the city will use the monies that they have allocated to Elm Playlot to buy more pre-fabricated, standardized, off-the-shelf, play equipment from a catalogue and install it.

If that happens, a familiar, sad story is destined to repeat: Because the new playground is not woven from or connected to the surrounding community, residents feel no sense of ownership in it. Without the community’s “eyes and ears” protecting the park, the play equipment is tagged again, its grounds are vandalized and occupied by others, and it is not used any more than before. After the city has spent thousand of dollars to renovate, nothing has changed: it’s the same broken, dysfunctional park as before––only with spanking new play equipment.

And the same vicious cycle of disuse and alienation will continue.

The time for Pogo Park is now.

WHO I AM My name is Toody Maher and I’m a resident of Richmond.

I am an artist, inventor, and entrepreneur. I graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1983 and, along with my brother, secured the distribution rights to Swatch Watch in the 11 Western States. In 1983, I helped to pioneer Swatch’s product launch, set up the regional office, and helped drive sales in my region from $0 in 1993 to $30 million in 1996. Afterward, I started another company, Fun Products, which created the world’s first clear telephone with lights (named Fortune Magazine’s “Product of the Year” in 1990). I was also named Inc. Magazine’s 1990 “Entrepreneur of the Year.”

Later, I became the Business Director at Juma Ventures, a San Francisco nonprofit that provides jobs and job training to youth at-risk. At Juma, I created a series of “social enterprise” businesses: Ben & Jerry’s ice cream stores and a Ben & Jerry’s/Tully’s coffee concession at Candlestick and PacBell Park, that employed 200 youth each year, age 14-21, primarily from San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunter’s Point and Mission districts.

For the past five years, I have invented, developed, and patented different products and either sold or licensed them to other companies. I have worked as a consultant on a project for a research institute at UCLA, helping to translate their scientific, evidence-based research into formats that people can actually use. It was during this project, when I was working on how to increase overall health and well-being in communities, that I realized how invaluable parks could be to children, families, and their communities if only the parks were properly designed.

My specialty is to take an idea and manifest it. I can make things happen and get things done. I’ve had 25 years of experience in building and growing businesses from scratch. I’m excellent at systems: designing and creating an infrastructure to ensure that all the parts work together. I’m a good communicator; I can talk across disciplines––law, graphic design, accounting, operations, marketing, product development, sales, and human resources.

I have built a network of incredible, talented, able, knowledgeable people in virtually every realm: engineers, graphic designers, architects, artists, writers, animators, photographers, poets, lawyers, accountants, illustrators, industrial designers, public relations specialists, insurance agents, web designers, researchers, journalists, film and television producers, directors, private investigators, doctors, teachers, electricians, plumbers, painters, architects, jewelry designers, cartoonists, draftsmen, general contractors. Whenever I need an answer, I know where to go.

I’m an excellent project manager: I have an innate ability to see how individual pieces fit into the whole, and then to motivate people to move and get things done.

More than anything, this project to re-think and re-build a community park has absolutely captivated me. This project would allow me to use my skills to benefit the community in which I live, and could prove to be the most creative, challenging, and fulfilling project of my life.

Toody with her nephew and niece

ADDENDUM In order to practice creating and building the unique play elements we envision for Elm Playlot, we recently created a children’s play area from scratch at the Evergreen Lodge near Yosemite National Park. Over four weekends, we worked with our friends from Scientific Art Studio in Richmond, to design and build three child-sized tipis (authentic replicas of Native American bark houses), a sandbox, and a rock to pound acorns; we and decorated the back fence with acrylic mirrors to give the entire play area a sense of depth and mystery.

This project provides an example of our capacity to build interesting, natural, and inexpensive play elements that can excite and delight children. To follow is a series of pictures of this children’s play area at Evergreen Lodge.