Grand Prairie community playground comes together quickly

by Kirk Dickey of Grand Prairie TODAY

Many hands make for light work. And the P3 Playground built at Charley Taylor Park had plenty of hands to help, April 4.

What started with a handful of organizers and a group of ninth graders at South Grand Prairie High School earlier this year ended with hundreds of volunteers working in the wind and sun that day, assembling, leveling and securing a playground for the community.

Organizers said about 400 people showed up to work on the playground, which was funded by the city and envisioned from the start as a community project.

“I think it is just amazing, the amount of people we got,” Parks Boardmember B.J. Nichols said. “You know, we've got people from all over Grand Prairie.”

He was especially glad to see several students from South Grand Prairie, who designed the playground with assistance from Parks and Recreation staffmembers earlier this year.

“We've had a really good turnout from those kids,” Nichols said. “That's one thing that has impressed me. They helped design the project, but they are also helping build it.”

He said that students have designed parks as class projects in the past, but this is the first time a group from Grand Prairie has worked with the city to actually build a playground.

But high school students were not the only ones working that day.

“We were pleasantly surprised that this many folks came out,” Christine Kang, another parks boardmember said.

Kang said the community response to the project was a strong one. She said the project drew volunteers from General Motors, Target, the Boy Scouts, the National Guard and the Grand Prairie High School JROTC, not to mention parks department workers and employees of Child's Play, Inc. who helped assemble the equipment.

“When we contacted the groups a lot of them thought it was a worthwhile project and something nice to do - something to feel good about for a change in the current (economic) situation,” Kang said. “Every group we contacted, just jumped right in. It was just a fabulous, fabulous response.”

One of those people responding to the call was Antonio Alaniz, a member of the Grand Prairie High School JROTC. And Alaniz said there were about 30 Gopher Battalion members on site.

“We thought it would be a good community experience,” he said. We thought it would be good for the city. And we are having a lot of fun.”

Alaniz worked transporting wood chips to be used for the playground surface from big mounds on either side of the site. Alaniz said he thought the number of volunteers present said something good about Grand Prairie.

“It says the community really cares,” he said. “For this many people to come out and build this playground, it is really cool.”

Arlington resident Latifah Carson, who heard about the project through her mother who works at the GM plant, said she was enjoying the work and felt like it was personally rewarding.

“I have little brothers and sisters and I wanted to do something like this to help kids,” she said. “It's good to do things like this when you can.”

She said that giving children of the neighborhood someplace to go was a good thing, and her job of pulling tools, working on the playground equipment and carrying equipment was just a small part. She said she would like to do more things like this in the future.

Nichols, who helped bring the idea to Grand Prairie after seeing it at a parks and recreation conference, said he was surprised by how quickly the project was coming together and that he was glad to see so many people out working on it.

“It's just been a really rewarding experience for me,” he said.