Pop and Play Day!

On Saturday September 17th, the Mayors Office of Civil Service hosted the Pop and Me Play Date Kick-Off Celebration! The event was held at the beautiful Smith Play Place located in Fairmount Park. The purpose of this event was to promote positive play between fathers and their sons. In addition to the playground, the event had food, drinks, and face painting for the families. Playworks was there to set up a few games and do what we do best, PLAY! Coaches Stephen, Aaron, Chris and Emily were in attendance at the event.

 If you have never heard of or been to the Smith Play Place, it is an incredible playground, far more than your average playground with monkey bars and see-saws. The design of this playground is unbelievable. The play structures were like nothing I have seen before. I could try to explain them in words, but my explanations would not do the structures justice. My best advice is check it out at http://smithkidsplayplace.org/ and you will not be disappointed!

 It was hard for us coaches, all in our twenties, to refrain from playing on the equipment. If we wanted to play on the structures, you could only imagine how much the children wanted to. Our job at the Pop and Play Date was to run game stations for the kids and parents attending the event. While kids were super excited to get involved with Playworks games, our biggest challenge of the day was competing with this awesome playground. Competing against a play structure on my recess yard has already been an obstacle I have been working on since the beginning of the school year.

 Today was no different, in fact, it was harder! It was a bit of a challenge to get kids to play switch and four-square when the playground from the future was staring them down. Another challenge was the space that we had. We had a small patch of grass that was a bit uneven.

 In true Playworks fashion, we worked around this obstacle and still set up some games and activities. Our biggest success was Switch! We got a bunch of great games of Switch going on throughout the day. Some of the kids just wanted to toss a Frisbee, or kick a ball around with us. Either way, we were there to help out the community by playing!

 Although we had to compete with the mega-playground, it was still a successful day for Playworks and everyone involved in the event.

 Written by: Aaron Stutz

September 11th Project with the Jewish Relief Agency

For our first service project, we worked with the Jewish Relief Agency in Northeast Philadelphia to help package and deliver food supplies to community members in need. To say the whole operation ran like a "well oiled machine" would be an understatement. Just imagine the whole operation as one big clock, with volunteers rotating around collecting food items from other volunteers then at the end giving it to other volunteers who packaged them up. All the volunteers were assigned to certain stations, making cardboard boxes or handing out food items. The Playworks team worked their way down the food assembly lines to collect items in each box. Finally, each member gave the box to the volunteers at the end of the assembly line who would package them and prepare them for delivery to the families in need.

After the Playworks Philadelphia crew was done packaging, we received our directions to the locations of apartments where we were assigned to drop off the food. This was the best part of the service project, handing out the food packages to the people. All of the people were more than thankful, and some even attempted to tip us! The majority of Northeast residents we delivered food to were immigrants from Russia and Poland who spoke little English. Although there was a slight language barrier you could still tell how thankful they all were.

Personally, I believed that September 11th was just a day for mourning and remembrance, but now after this service project I realized that we can continue to move forward and using this day to make our community and nation a better place. Written by: Alex Correa