Langdon playground project still looking for helping hands
Shannon LeClair
Times Reporter
Residents of Langdon had joined forces to promote their plans to improve the playground at the school for the AVIVA Community Fund competition. The parks committee had finished segment one and were hoping to gain funding for segment two.
“We don’t have the best news, but there is still some positive things that are going on,” said Shelagh Phelps, a member of the parks committee. Segment one was creating the first wheelchair accessible playground in the municipal district of Rockyview. Segment two, originally, was to build a playground for the rest of the age groups. There will still be accessibility for wheelchairs and walkers and right now the plan is the ground will be rubber. Part of segment two is to also connect the school pathway to the community pathway. The kids were a big part in deciding the design of the playground. The project wasn’t picked as one of the winners, but they did make it to ninth place out of 90 projects, which in itself was a huge accomplishment for the community.
“That’s awesome considering we are probably the smallest community out of all of them,” said Phelps.
Phelps said the support was phenomenal and Golden West radio was donated airtime over the holidays to help promote the project.
“We couldn’t have done it without the support of not only our friends and family across the country, but the help of the towns around us.”
A few companies that have grants available for what they are trying to do have approached them. Phelps and the group wanted to wait to find out whether they won the AVIVA project before looking further into those grants. She said they are contacts that they would never have known about if they hadn’t participated in the competition. The next step now is to redesign the project, because the design they have been working on is a few years old. Phelps said they are going to go back to the kids and community and see what they want to do, and take it to the vendors for new quotes. They are looking at a 5,000 sq. foot footprint that will allow 160 children simultaneously playing on the equipment. Phelps said they have $75,000 raised out of the $450,000 segment two will cost. Phelps is hoping with rescaling and new quotes they may be able to bring the costs down, hopefully to $350,000.
“Basically what we want to do is validate what it is that we’re doing, based on the age and grants that are out there for us,” said Phelps.
Langdon could enter the project again next year if they wanted, even for segment two again, but Phelps said they probably won’t. If they were to enter again it would be in a couple of years because the amount of effort put in was huge.
“We would really have to evaluate if we entered again. For us to be able to generate enough votes to end up in the top three, I don’t know if it would even be possible,” said Phelps.
Phelps said looking at the amount of effort to raise votes was really great and she doesn’t know if they would be able to do much better. Even though the project didn’t win, there are still ways to help. With the help of AVIVA and the okay from the school division, there is now a donation button. Where before on the website it would say ‘vote now,’ there is now a button that says ‘donate now.’ Go to avivacommunityfund.org and type Langdon into search ideas to find the ‘donate now’ button.