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Tips for a Successful Playground Project

Find a leader with a vision. “The most challenging part is communicating the vision to get people to help,” says Winskill Elementary Principal Jamie Nutter. “People are the most important aspect of building.”

Don’t focus on the money. Winskill is a fairly small school in a small, rural town. Its families are not wealthy, and the school’s poverty rate is 31 percent. Even so, they had no trouble raising more than $100,000 once they promoted the project as a community playground. “Don’t worry about the money part right away,” Nutter says. “For us, that was actually the easy part.”

Don’t get discouraged. “It seemed like a very daunting project once we got into it,” says Donna Lensing, former treasurer of the Friends of Winskill. “And you’ll run into little bits of controversy—some people will think it’s too much money; they’ll say, ‘All we had was teeter-totters and slides when we were kids.’ But it was worth all the headaches because the reward was just huge. I still drive past and see how much fun the kids have.”

Expect the unexpected. At Winskill, the trauma of 9/11 threatened to derail that fall’s fundraising campaign, and bad weather made construction more of a challenge. But the parent group was committed enough—and flexible enough—to get the job done.

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