KaBOOM Playground Build
Overview and Intent
KaBOOM! is a national non-profit that empowers communities to build playgrounds. They believe that play has purpose, and that unstructured play in particular helps make children happier, fitter, smarter, more socially adept and creative. Your chapter can help build a playspace in a number of ways: you can simply find an existing project and show up to help, or you can plan, design, fundraise, and host your own build day with other community partners.
Participants Required/Time Commitment
The number of participants required depends on the level of commitment you choose. We recommend that you support an existing project, as few as three or four brothers would be sufficient and the time commitment would be only a few hours. If you choose to lead your own project, you should commit to having several brothers make semester or yearlong commitments, with the entire chapter chipping in throughout the year and showing up for the day of the build.
Steps Required
To volunteer to support an existing project:
- Visit to find a project near you. This website includes many projects which have been completed, are inactive, or in the very early planning stages. I also recommend looking at to find active projects.
- Once you have found a project that you’d like to help with, circulate the time, date, and location amongst the chapter to determine how many people will be available to participate.
- When you have firm commitments from brothers, visit the project’s page on the KaBOOM! web site and click on the RSVP link. Your chapter will be required to create a profile with KaBOOM!, and once you have done so, you can indicate how many volunteers you have.
- Send reminders to the brothers who have committed to volunteer the day before the event.
- On the day of the event, all you have to do is show up (unless the site coordinator has specified otherwise).
- During and after the event, make sure to take pictures!
There are two ways to develop and manage your own project. First, instead of merely supplying volunteers for a project as listed above, you can create and manage your own playground build. For more info, visit
If you want to undertake a huge project, you can help your school become a KaBOOM! community partner. In doing so will the KaBOOM! national organization will provide two months of step-by-step guidance who will then help with the building of a playground with the assistance of 200 volunteers. This requires a commitment to recruit volunteers, raise $10,000, and be heavily involved with planning. If this interests you, visit
Materials Required
None (unless otherwise noted by project managers). Feel free to volunteer the use of any building tools or materials that you have easy access to.
Key Tasks
Identify a project, communicate with project leader the number of volunteers you can commit, follow through on commitments.
Issues
Make sure you find a project that will work for you. The projects on the KaBOOM! website vary in likelihood of completion, so pick one that is active and will actually take place!
Resources
Evaluation
Count the number of brothers who participate and the hours spent. The project manager will also know how many children are likely to benefit from the playground you build.