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a real watering hole for the whole community,” says Maher.
“We staff the parks all day, they are lit up at night, and we
are packed cause they are in the most densely populated
neighborhood in Richmond and this is a place where
everybody can go that is safe and clean.”
In addition to an enriching and dynamic play environment
for children, Elm Playlot offers daily classes that are free and
open to anyone in the community—all they have to do
is show up. “Another thing that has been huge is the free
haircuts for kids on Fridays,” she says. “Every Friday afternoon
someone from the community sets up and all the kids come
to get their haircut.” And, in a community that is revenged
by poverty, the park also serves as a distribution point for the
school district free meals program. “Right now we serve after
school snack and supper,” Maher says. “Last year we were
able to serve 12,000 meals to hungry children.” Many times
Maher has been told that Pogo Park’s Elm Playlot is truly the
heartbeat of the community.
Pogo Park has been going strong for more than a decade,
but what is this organization doing differently than what so
many others have attempted to do and failed in the past?
Maher states that deep community engagement is
the hallmark to the Pogo Park success. “Money
has always just been put into fixing the bones—a
new community center, a new house, or a new
park,” she describes. “But there hasn’t been
investment in the spirit, which is the people.
You have to do both—spirit and bones.”
In 2007 Maher began her community
outreach by asking the people in the
neighborhood what it was that they wanted and
why the park was not working. The Pogo team
treated those in the neighborhood as the experts
of their own community and brought them into
the team as employees and advisors from the
start. “What we have tried to do from day one is
to listen to the community,” she says.
A root problem as to why the Elm Playlot,
the first Pogo Park project, had continued to
fail, even after the City of Richmond invested
hundreds of thousands of dollars in new play
structures only to have them destroyed within
weeks, was because the problems in the
neighborhood just outside the park’s boundaries
were never addressed. “When we started,
every house around the park was boarded up
except for one, the drug house. The park was
completely covered in glass and needles, it was
just awful,” she recalls. Maher continues to
describe how the park was also, “a big place to
bring dogs to train them to fight.”
With a $3 million grant from HUD and with
the help of the city, Pogo Park was able to purchase all of
the homes around the Elm Playlot. After three years of work
clearing out the drug house and restoring the homes around
the park, the neighborhood is full of families living in each of
the homes.
Once clearing the neighborhood around Elm of illicit
activity, the Pogo community member team to set to work
on bringing the park back to life. Through a partnership with
Scientific Art Studio, a world renowned fabrication studio in
the Iron Triangle neighborhood that is famous for “pushing
the limits of that is possible at a park and play space,” says
Maher, Pogo has been able to create a play space for children
that is unique. “This partnership has been phenomenal. They
have adopted us and we have our community resident team
in their studio,” she says. “We actually have a shop in their
shop where anything we want to build for the parks we build
there.”
So, the community has done the outreach, the planning,
the building, and “the community is actually managing the
parks,” as Maher explains. “The community has learned so