Help Us End the Playground Mud Mess

I own a small child care center with an in-home feel. Over the 10 years we have had our amazing "castle" location, we have transformed so many spaces within it while keeping the top priorities of offering reasonable rates, decent pay for our staff, and quality care and activities for the children. It has been a slow but rewarding process to build our program. We have been blessed with grants and a few small fundraisers to assist in the process. We remained open through COVID and continue to be a quality program for our families. However, our slow process to build the environment for our kids that I have envisioned for our outdoor space seems to be not only slow but backward. Last year, thousands of dollars and a lot of work went into much-needed leveling of our playground space and adding sod. After a summer of play, the playground is back to being mostly mud. Clearly, sod was not the option. The cost of the other surfacing options is just too far out of the budget for our smaller program without substantially affecting the cost to our families or income for our staff.

Which brings me to our wish. We would like to raise money towards improving our playground. Any amount added to our budget just helps get us closer to our goals of providing a much less messy and more manageable surfacing for our growing exploration and play outside learning space.