Here’s how 1 Calgary school built a playground in a day

A group of volunteers build a playground in a day in Calgary in a collaboration between Foresters Financial, Kaboom! and the Foundation for the Future Charter Academy.

If you build it, they will come.

That’s a line from the old baseball classic Field of Dreams, but it could just as easily apply to Foresters Financial, which teamed up with Kaboom! and a group of students from the Foundation for the Future Charter Academy (FFCA) to build a playground in a single day.

The playground design came from the students, who held an April Design Day where 19 classroom “champions” helped imagine what the playground might look like.

“We’re very excited to be building a playground for the kids in the community at FFCA School,” said Foresters Financial Chief Commercial Officer Andrea Frossard. “It’s an exciting way to give back to the community and to support families.

“We’ve been doing this now with Kaboom! for 20 years and this is our 178^th playground we’ve built with Kaboom! -- and we actually have two more coming this year as well."

Kaboom! is a non-profit organization dedicated to ending playspace inequity.

1 day build

All of which begs the question: how do you build an entire playground in a single day?

“It’s amazing,” Frossard said. “You show up in the morning and really, you have an empty field, and then by the time the day is done, because of the contributions everybody is making – whether it’s mixing cement, moving mulch (or) putting up play structures – all those individual contributions come together to create a great play space for the community and the school."

As far as the student involvement in designing the playground, Frossard said they presented a compelling vision.

“Each classroom nominated a champion from the classroom and then they were involved in picking out the play structures that they wanted to see,” she said.

“And I guess there was so much enthusiasm that we actually doubled the size of the playground -- so we’re extremely excited about that as well.”

With files from CTV News’ Tommy Osborne