Grounds to play

By Mark Young
Published August 28, 2010, in The North Platte Telegraph
http://www.nptelegraph.com/articles/2010/08/28/news/40000711.txt

NORTH PLATTE, NEBRASKA—The Connection homeless shelter is largely a facility for people who are down on their luck. It's not an environment where you might think young children would have an opportunity to smile, laugh, play and just be kids.

Thanks to the Buffalo Bill chapter of Kiwanis, the sounds of laughter will soon be audible from outside of the homeless shelter as Phase One of their playground project began first thing Friday morning. Through grants, donations and fundraisers, the Buffalo Bill Kiwanis has raised the necessary $35,000 to install brand new playground equipment on the shelter's grounds.

It's a project that has been in the works for several years, according to Kiwanis member Jay Engel, and was started by the late Gordon C. Christiansen who passed away a couple of years ago from cancer. Because it was Christiansen who first spearheaded the playground effort, it was an honor for the Kiwanis to name it the Gordon C. Christiansen Memorial Playground.

"He wasn't even a member, but was a neighbor of one our members," said Engel. "He found out what we wanted to do and really starting spearheading the effort himself about 5 years ago. Unfortunately, we lost him a couple of years ago and we wanted to find a fitting way to honor his efforts."

Engel said the club started simple enough by putting out jars at area businesses and all that loose change soon added up to about $2,000.

"The rest came from various fundraisers. We received a nice gift from the American German Society and another nice gift from the estate of Oliver Durbin," said Engel. "We received donations across the board that ranged from a few cents to thousands of dollars. We put the word the out there and the community stepped up."

The money raised was enough to begin phase one of the playground project. The remainder of the funding, a $16,500 grant, arrived a few days ago from the Nebraska-Iowa Kiwanis district foundation. When Linda Thompson submitted the grant, she admits that she was merely "fishing for about $1,000," she said.

"I thought if they gave us $1,000 it would be great," she said. "We were at our meeting and I was going through the mail. It fell out of the pile and when I looked at it, I just started jumping up and down and was screaming."

The Kiwanis motto is "changing the world one child at a time." They say the playground project is a perfect fit to their overall mission of improving the quality of a child's life and doing so at a homeless shelter is something the club is proud to be involved in, as was evident on Friday morning when about a third of the club's members showed up to do the labor.

"It's all about the kids," said Engel. "We don't feel that just because a child is in a homeless shelter means they should have less of a quality of life and fewer opportunities than other children. We wanted to provide a safe, enjoyable environment for them."

The family quarters of the shelter is sequestered from the remaining facility and the children who are being housed at the shelter will have private access to the playground, which itself will be surrounded with a privacy fence.

Engel said Phase Two of the project should be completed by October. Organizers are waiting for the remaining equipment to arrive from overseas where most of today's modern playground equipment is manufactured.

The Buffalo Bill Kiwanis meets the every first Tuesday of the month at the Depot Restaurant. Anyone wishing to join this chapter, volunteer or donate to a Kiwanis project can contact Mike Sovereign at 520-5584 or Engel at 534-9694.