Empowering Play Time: Raising Funds for St. Dominic’s Playground

The Cause

The St. Dominic School Parent Advisory Society is a non-profit organization that supports and fundraises efforts for the St. Dominic Elementary School and surrounding community, located in Edmonton, Alberta. Our idea is to build a new inclusive and accessible playground at St. Dominic that will provide our whole community with a place to play and socialize together.
With this project we wish to guarantee that the people in the neighbourhoods surrounding our school have a dependable and reliable place to gather and enjoy the outdoors. We hope for this playground to offer all the children in our community with a welcoming, accessible, and stimulating place to play, as well as a communal gathering space for young families and neighbors. The 30-year-old play set we have at the school has been well loved, but is damaged and lacks many accessibility features, preventing everyone in our community from accessing and taking advantage of this vital public space. This problem is also an opportunity. To rectify the lacking accessibility features of our old playground, our intentions are for this new play area to be wheelchair accessible, appropriate and safe for all children, and of course, fun to play on.
We are incredibly excited about offering our community an inclusive new infrastructure that will serve everyone. Prioritizing values of inclusivity, sustainability, and accessibility, our new playground will feature a range of modern equipment designed to nurture engagement, physical activity, and social interaction for children of all ages and abilities. Research has shown that physical activity leads to more positive moods, longer attention spans, and fewer behavioral issues in children. We understand how important physical activity is for the social and cognitive development of our community’s children and youth. It is with this knowledge that we are embarking on this new playground development project.

Who Will it Benefit?

The goal for this project is to develop a play area that will serve the whole community of St. Dominic, and people from surrounding neighbourhoods. As parents and teachers at St. Dominic School, we appreciate the support and solidarity that the people in our area have, and we want to contribute to that sense of belonging in our community by improving an already vital public space.
The main group of people who will benefit from this project will be the families and young children of the neighborhoods surrounding our school. The main neighborhoods nearby to our school, and who will benefit from this freely available play area include Brintnell, Casselman, Hollick-Kenyon, Kildare, Kilkenny, McConachie, McLeod, Miller, and York. Recent census data shows that the population of these neighborhoods surrounding our school has been increasing in recent years. As these communities grow, we want this new playground to adequately serve their needs for the years to come. Expanding the capacity and durability of our play area will ensure that our growing community will have a reliable and accessible place to play and enjoy going forward.
This new free facility will have a positive and lasting impact on our surrounding neighbourhoods. This new facility will ensure that the people who live in our surrounding neighbourhoods will have a place to get together and socialize, improving the lives of the whole community. Many of the neighborhoods in our area have high rates of unemployment and lower incomes. This freely available new public play area will remove some of the financial barriers that young families can often face. Our existing playground is already a well-used space for many community members. Increasing the accessibility and safety of this play area will only increase the ability of this facility to bring people together and allow people to join in and gather with their fellow neighbors, ultimately enhancing the sense of belonging that exists in our neighborhoods.