the slide

 

We’ve entered the Aviva Community Fun Competition to try to bring our reviews coast to coast in Canada. Please take two minutes to sign up and vote for us. Our entry text is below:

 

This project is all about the importance of outdoor play in an age when TV, toys and technology attracts young people and their parents to stay indoors. Currently the initiative functions at a local BC level but with the help of Aviva, this could spread to local urban communities across the entire of Canada.

Swings and Roundabouts started as a local online community resource in Victoria BC providing playground reviews that would encourage local parents to get their children playing outdoors. The website received immediate media attention and quickly grew a dedicated local following. Parents repeatedly told us that they had been looking for a resource that listed local playgrounds including what type of equipment and play environment was available- so that they could try new places that were suitable for their kids.

Requests started to arrive to launch the same kind of site for other BC cities and so the initiative launched a Vancouver site. There have been numerous requests to launch sites in other cities but we felt that we needed to have processes that worked locally before we could expand nationally. As Swings and Roundabouts launched in Vancouver, we quickly realized that to maintain a consistent quality and feel to the site that we needed a very specific kind of reviewer who would be able to commit to multiple high quality reviews, adding personality and humour. To attract and retain high quality reviewers Swings and Roundabouts would like to be able to compensate the writers- acknowledging the time, effort and skills that they bring to the project- yet without having to resort to advertisements that would retract from this non-profit resource.

This is where the Aviva fund comes in. Swings and Roundabouts would like to have the resources to be able to launch nationally. We would like to create software to host local playground reviews for each major Canadian city, be able to compensate reviewers who would bring personality-filled, family friendly writing to the resource and we would also like to offer comprehensive resources for communities that want to build a playground.

Swings and Roundabouts wants to be a national non-profit organization that offers local community resources with the end aim of encouraging outdoor play. The act of local parents and writers coming together to bring the content to each site location’s also supports the idea of community. In addition to this, Swings and Roundabouts would like to also run an initiative to help teenagers to build their writing skills by offering local level mentorships where Swings and Roundabouts reviewers would offer feedback and guidance for teens who review playgrounds for the site. This would encourage participating teens with their writing skills, their computer skills and their awareness of local community at the same time as they would be adding content to their Swings and Roundabouts site.

Contact Swings and Roundabouts: victoriablog@yahoo.ca