and anyone who would like to become a part of our board please see me and get in touch with them because we really would like to have new ideas and how the people it's fun i've been on a route and it's fun so now to introduce alan and diane ellen shriver did a small brown bag for us about the year and a half ago or so or so when she started thinking about all the recreation things that we haven't done and that they were all fall and not know that it was going on and i i know i volunteered for about five days myself and there are about over two thousand people who volunteer and almost half a million dollars that was raised which was clearly a huge undertaking and i was just curious if people could raise their hand how many people in the room helped out or donated money yeah and that's part of why i think it worked but behind the scenes there were two years of planning preparation to make it work ellen and tell you where the folks that made this happen and they they had they started out with nice degrees from nice schools but coincidently they both went to harvard at different times  background in architecture ellen and she called that work collecting but she's very good at founding new organizations and managing them and one of them was about parks and recreation in town so they made a great team for charities park and they're here to tell you how they got so thank you bonnie thank you mary and thank you to the league we're so excited to be here we're excited to see so many friends in the room and i have to say that the one theme i hope you take away from everything we have to say is that this project really happened  because of all of the friends in town because of everybody coming together and we made so many new friends and everybody on the project made so many new friends and doing it so overarching theme just pay attention to it ok so let me start by just telling you a little bit about what joey's park is because there's probably people like me who i lived in town for a long time and i never knew what joey's park was and my kids were playing on it and i still never knew what joey's park was even though there's a sign that says joe is park and when my kids went to  kindergarten at the whim of school and came home and said mommy i want to play on joey's park i'm like oh you mean the park that's right by the school ok joey's park is a really below playground in belmont it's right on cross street next to the wind brooke school it used the entire school day by the students at wynberg when they're on recess and it's used in the afternoons and on the weekends by the rest of the town as well but you'll also see tons of kids from the soccer teams so all we get along you'll see kids playing on the playground why is it so special i think i thought about this a lot i think there's four key reasons the first is joey joey was a beloved lovely energetic wonderful boy who died when he was twelve cystic fibrosis and the playground was built in order to honor his memory so that's one second i think is because it was built like this one as a community built and so a thousand people in belmont came together to build  one thousand people had ownership stake in the playground because they helped to build it thirdly it was a really magical playground it was neat different it was fast you could run anywhere it was like a castle but it didn't have to be a castle it could be a rocket ship it could be anything  so people love to the playground that invites this creative play and thirdly fourthly i think is all the families so there's twenty four years of children who grew up playing on joyce park so for any one of those four reasons people love this playground and that was something we kept in mind as we approached i'm sorry i forgot to say it was condemned in two thousand and eleven the safety inspectors came in and there were issues with the playground thankfully due to the department public works we were able to temporarily reopen it so a lot of things were fixed but that was all sort of under the caveat that we needed to  so we would like to begin our presentation by outlining some of the overarching goals that we had for this project and i think as evidenced by the summary that helen just gave you of the overall part that primary goal that we had was to really retain what we called the magic of joey's park and there were many aspects to that including honoring the history of the park and also maintaining the look and feel of this wooden castle like structure which is a fairly unique looking playground  in addition to that though we also needed to update the material so that we would have more modern materials that would have longer lifespans and less maintenance and less safety issues we also needed for the playground to meet current safety standards and accessibility requirements and there were some other things that we wanted to do in terms of improving the functionality of the playground so for example and a lot of these came from the survey that we'll talk about in and a minute but for example there is there is a top lot which is a play area for children ideally under the age of five and some of the feedback that we got from the community was that that was a part of the playground that could really be enhanced that could be a little bit more separate from the rest of the play structure and also easier for supervision and have a few more features that would engage those kids so there were you know very specific aspects like that that we also brought into this but overall we were really striving to create a exciting place for the families of  t because that's what the existing jelly's park is or what was and we wanted to build a community as well as building a structure and so that was a major part of our practice and overall we just wanted to keep it fun so what we have for you next is we're basically going to go through we have these five bullet points that we're going to talk through that are sort of the telling the story of how we did this through numbers but before we get into the first one or perhaps well speaking on the first one which is time we are going to show a time lapse video that we just got our hands on yesterday from jeff and the belmont media center and it's really fun and what this video is that the emcee put together it's one hundred and twenty hours of community build construction condensed down into about two minutes so i'm going to set that up in ellen's got a few things to say while we're watching  that so watch that listen to me so how did it happen how did we build the new joeys park so this is a story of numbers first time this was an absolutely enormous project as you'll see as all those people scurry along the site it was a two year project the old always park was shut down on november second of two thousand and eleven and the new joys park was opened on october eighth of two thousand thirteen it's almost to the day two years i should say it's not really fully done there are still a handful of things like landscaping that will happen this spring that we're still planning three months was the actual work on the playground from demolition all the way through finishing the punch list that was august september and october and most of that work i would say actually all of that work was done by contract local contractors donating their time and by our town departments particularly the d p w as well as the lighting department so it was huge project the community bill and all of that portion of the project nobody really like you saw it happening but you you weren't involved in it nine days is when all the people were involved that was the community builds and for each of those days there were thirteen hours from seven o'clock in the morning until eight o'clock at night when we were working on the site and by october i'll tell you it is dark by eight o'clock so we had lights that the the belmont light department head hooked up for us to make it possible to continue to work into those hours from a money point of view our goal with this was to make it a true public private partnership and i have to say i think we were enormously successful in that we received a one hundred thousand dollars grant from the community preservation act thanks to the committee led by paul solomon who recommended us for it and then town meeting who voted unanimously for us to get that grant which stunned us we were waiting for questions and challenges and never got any and then one hundred fifty thousand in private donations which came from two thousand different actually more than two thousand different donations of all sizes we put a huge emphasis on grassroots fund raising in addition to large donor fund raising so of those two thousand donations they ranged everywhere from a dollar which included lemonade stand and all kinds of things the kids did spontaneously all the way up to fifty thousand dollars just two of our large donations every dollar made a huge difference in being able to do this there were two plus in kind donations which never showed up on the books and sponsorships by local businesses so it was really something everybody participated in and some of the unsung heroes in the in the funding area were these massive pro bono donations from some of our local contractors that we truly could not possibly have done this project without them so community was a critical part of this project obviously and we wanted to walk you through a little bit of the organizational structure of our most valuable resource which was our human resources our volunteers so starting with ellen and i obviously as the t we counted in our inbox is over five thousand e mails and those are just not including the ones that have gotten deleted over the course of time so lots and lots of e mails back and forth many of them were between ellen and i at like three four in the morning and neither one of us to sleeping for a little while there but so every ever steering committee led thirteen subcommittees and those included community input in the very beginning of the project and a design committee treasury of course and fundraising both grassroots and large donor fund raising public city and volunteers and then during the builder it related to build we had materials committee we had a tool committee and we had a site for nader and then as far as support services we also had a food subcommittee and childcare subcommittee and a public art committee that's still very active working on a public art feature that will be arriving in the spring all of these committees had additional members so we had twenty five persons during committee and then we had another hundred people that were members of these committees that were over the course of two years planning and organizing and getting ready for the culminating in that which was of course the community bill so at the bill that as bonnie had mentioned we had over two thousand volunteers which was phenomenal and there were days where we were worried that we would get out the the numbers but people came and they came in large droves the volunteers were of all different ages and that was something that was really exciting about this project we worked ahead of time we planned to have ways to engage volunteers of different ages because it's a playground for kids and we knew that the young kids would want to feel a part of the process as well and they would want to build joey's park not just their parents  where children under the age of ten they helped at the family build day to spread them all to with their parents and rakes and wheelbarrows and we also had an assortment of other activities that were age appropriate for them to participate in for the tweens the kids that are between ten and thirteen they were not allowed on the construction site for safety reasons but we had a lot of wood that we would bring outside of the construction fence for them to paint and they embraced that job and they painted more wood then we needed to have peter we just kept finding scrap wood and bringing it up because oh my god these kids were loving their job the fourteen to seventeen year old where a wonderful part of our of our group of the two thousand volunteers i think of over half of them was around half of them were under the age of eighteen which is amazing and so they help to digging the holes and they helped with burying the lumber out to the people that were assembling and and so then we have everyone over the age of eighteen who were involved in a lot of different tasks everything from cutting and routing the wood to assembling the the wood pieces themselves to installing the manufactured equipment and then we also had a lot of nona build related rules for people that didn't feel comfortable on a construction site but so these were people that manned our registration table and that added them to the tool trailer and served food to the volunteers and organized and provided childcare for the children of the volunteers so it was a very labor intensive and many make light work and the members of the community were such a critical part of this project so how do you get two thousand people there that was actually a question that we asked a lot of ourselves and i would say the first big answer to that is really focusing a lot on p r and communications two key themes there and one is really focusing on engaging the whole community we wanted to have a role for everybody and we wanted everybody to know what we were doing hopefully come out and join us participate in some way whether it was making a donation or sending an e mail to let people know about it and then also we wanted to really make sure we were very transparent about what we were doing we wanted everyone to have a lot of this ability into how the project was going so in november of two thousand and eleven we started with regular e mail updates this is when the playground was shut down about the email updates about what's happening with the playground that preceded until we needed to form a committee and we sent out a lot of communications to form a committee we  had three hundred fifty participants participate in our community input survey this is something that we did of about half of them were women parents and about half of them were parents and families from the rest of the town and this was where we asked people what they wanted what did the you know what do they like what do they not like what needed you know what was your vision for the playground and that really drove the design of the playground over the course of the project we used e mail like you wouldn't believe we had over a thousand people join our e mail list and we kept them involved but we also used e mail lists from the school in the rec department and all my savings bank and various community list serves as this cystic fibrosis foundation and just a lot of people helped us get the word out in addition over the course of the project we spent a lot of time trying to tell our story and it wasn't one story it was lots of stories we actually had to sit there and figure out which story did we want to tell because there's too many of them you know anywhere from you know joey's story to the kids playing on it to the people who built it before to philmont serves big you know being a partner to there were stories upon stories and stories but we had over one hundred stories in the citizen herald the patch the globe the belmont media center and five or six different television stations so that was a huge emphasis in addition to the outgoing outbound communications we also put together seven different events over the course of a year from september of twenty twenty twelve through october twenty third teen and that really helped us build the momentum so we announced everything in september two thousand and twelve but we didn't ever want the momentum to last so on september twelfth on september twenty twelve we had designed day with over four hundred fifty kids sharing their ideas for the playground in october of that year we had our walk a thon which was our very first fundraising event we had over a thousand people walk and we raised over sixty thousand dollars in a single grassroots event in april of tw thirteen we had a big community photo where we invited people to come and we had over a thousand people come and somewhere up there i think at the beginning we had the photo up there of everybody on the park celebrating this park that we all adored may third two thousand and thirteen we had  farewell celebration which we at the time didn't really want to call it very well because it felt too too poignant but it was celebrating the part that we had and that we loved and that had over a thousand people in september two thousand and thirteen we started the community build on september twenty seventh as you heard we had over two thousand volunteers and that which we haven't heard yet is that there were over fifty different groups that participated in that and got people to come on the very last day of the build march  monday columbus day and october thirteenth was belmont service and we had over a thousand people come parents and children come and help spread the mulch and help get the playground prepared to have people play on it momentum so all of this brings us up to the building in late september and early october there are nine days so this was sort of our culminating event obviously and we wanted to talk about our structure o really directed this team of volunteers and so first they were directing the crew captains and we had over one hundred people that signed up to be crew captains and on any given day we had between ten and fifteen crew captains on site and these crew captains are really i think our unsung heroes they volunteered for these the full thirteen hour day and while they're on site each one of them is leading a team of ten approximately ten volunteers who we had on average one hundred people volunteer ing on site at any given point in time the volunteers were working in shifts so we had three shifts per day but the thing that's interesting about the volunteers in the group captains is that of the volunteers as people who are coming in registering many of you know this if you were there we asked if  were skilled or unskilled and that was defining your comfort level or your ability to use power tools can so we had about a third of our volunteers were skilled and the remaining of their volunteers were unskilled and so these crew captains were people many of them were in the construction industry but not all of them some of them were just sort of born leaders and incredibly dedicated souls but what they had to do is they had to teach their team of volunteers what it is that they needed to do what their task was for that shift or for that day and then they had to oversee what they were doing and they were responsible for quality control and making sure that everybody was safe and that the park was being built in a safe way and that everybody was having fun so it was really a remarkable job that those folks did we also want to talk about what we did during the build and we have some fun statistics for you beginning with the he's a post that you see in the images was a photo taken on a misty morning right as we were getting started but we had to dig two hundred holes and this was it we discovered very difficult soil to dig and if anybody was there during the prebuilt or knows anybody that was there during the rebuild a many of the holes where by contractors that did this work pro bono with heavy equipment but there was although a tremendous amount of hand digging that needed to happen as things were moving around to fit because this is a custom built piece custom built structure so there is a a lot of digging and just back breaking labor and it's amazing these people all left with miles on their faces and many of them came back for more  but in addition to digging these holes we had to then go and place the posts in all of two hundred holes and these posts that you see here are made out of a structure material called structural plastic which is much more dense than normal lumber and so  six by some of them fourteen foot long structural plastic post was significantly heavy and it would take five people to carry each of these posts so people look at and they think oh you know me and my buddy can lift it now five people and five people who were struggling after several hours of hauling these posts back and forth in addition to that we had two thousand five hundred sticks of structural plastic and tracks that all needed to be cut and routed and assembled and we had a prefab tent where a lot of that happened and then we had fifty two manufactured equipment they needed to be installed so the park has of course wings and a merry go round and monkey bars and a decline and things of that sort that also needed to be installed so as this is all getting built we are  site by volunteers and our site is fifteen thousand square feet so lots and lots of engineers with fiber in order to do all of this we had six hundred tools on our list these are hand tool anything ranging from hand tools hammers and tape measures tools things of that sort and these tools were all loaned to us six hundred of them from members of the community so we collected the tools we labeled them we use them every single day return them to our tool trailer at the end of the day organize them so we could find in the next day and then at the end of the build we returned them to all six hundred owners who could then use them at their homes again so that in an open self was a tremendous effort in addition to all of the work that we were doing by hand of course throughout all of this during the build before during and after the build we had the local contractors who we are so indebted to and they were on site with their equipment and we had a lot of large construction vehicles so we had the end they were used for activities such as digging a hole and very very in the mulch and setting the roofs and these included things such as a crane bobcats augers dump trucks and a concrete mixer and most of this everything except for the concrete mixer was with donated pro bono so while we were building in support of it these builders that we also opened a nine day along the restaurants that was approved by the health department and we had th the purpose of this restaurant is to feed all two thousand volunteers we had to feed breakfast lunch we serve breakfast lunch and dinner so we served about one hundred people at each meal for all those days and then they also provided snacks and refreshments for the volunteers because there were some days when it was really hot out there and even when it wasn't hot they were working so hard and it was so critical to have the popsicles and the home baked goods and water bottle coming through for the volunteers so they orchestrated all of that as well and also on the topic of support we had of course a child care program for the younger children so that they could be engaged while their parents are volunteering and so this was wonderful and we had over three hundred kids that were entertained through this program and what was wonderful about it is that it against the kids but it also enabled their parents to participate so that was valuable into the lot of planning on that end as well and then another thing that we really made a strong effort to do was to make sure that our volunteers felt appreciated and so we had meetings dedicated to volunteer appreciation and you know put forth a strong effort to make sure that everybody felt welcomed and felt that we had thanked them profusely for their efforts and when the last note on the bill that we're particularly proud of is something that we were worried about going into it a lot of people a lot of and kill people and very dense quite a lot of work going on in a very short timeframe we had no major injuries and we were both made very relieved  all right so we didn't do this ourselves and even the two thousand people coming out didn't do it themselves the next big strategic piece of what we did here was really focused on partnerships and we knew that it was going to be critical we we at one point started referring to them as the  builders bankers in magic makers because it really came from all different directions in order to make this happen the first of the sets of partners that i really need to highlight our job and kathy o'donnell who are joey's parents and they were amazing to work with they were constant support and guidance and inspiration for us through the project they really shared their story they shared their ideas and their connections they were one of our major donors they helped us raise the money and even still today they're helping us thank the volunteers in the people who put it together so i can't thank them enough the town of belmont was a strategic partner here from the selections office the treasurer's office the department of public works which they are just the most amazing department i've ever seen in the belmont like department the police the fire the health department all kept us safe the school department gave us support in more ways than i can even tell you so we did our town the there were a whole ton of builders that brought their expertise to the table and made things happen that most people have no idea the first ones i want to highlight are suffolk construction they for an entire month they sent us a construction project manager who was on site helping to make sure that things were flowing and that everything got finished up in the project was done and we were able to open it on time they also said sixty two captains who were volunteers from the organization would come on the weekends or in the evening or a day during work and they would  spend their time as a crew captain they gave us a crane they gave us construction fence they finished our punch list locally here three that just amazing people were let french and mahoney who were on not only their heavy equipment but their friendship and their commitment to the community and for the most part it's all unsung they don't want a lot of recognition for it they just want to help and i'm  e so and then there were a lot of other local contractors who have all pitched in so you know that's mostly ollie and valley crested however in a whole whole bunch of other folks so that's the builders the corporate side belmont savings bank was our very first sponsor for the walk in our very first sponsor for the build they also gave us incentives and prizes that we could use during the walk in the build they helped us with publicity they sent out forty people as a team to work on the playground and i have to say anything that we came up with that we needed help with they help d they were very committed partner another very committed partner was vertex pharmaceuticals this is the company that makes drugs for cystic fibrosis they have a huge partnership with and they receive a lot of funding from the joey fund which was created by the o'donnells to raise money for cures and they have a annual day of service that they shut down the company and they sent between one hundred two hundred people out here on the first day of the bill in order to kick off the project they also did a huge p r campaign for us together with suffolk and so our biggest publicity came from that p r event and they also kate's grant so you know we couldn't have done it without these partners the other partners i need to mention which is heartwarming is our the community partners that were so instrumental belmont serves i mentioned earlier but we actually scheduled the bill to coincide with belmont centers because a year ago they asked us if we had any projects for the masters and we didn't anticipate next year we will and so we made it so that  build concluded on the day of belmont serves and columbus day and so you know they typically get four hundred people in town doing community service projects all over town will they brought out a thousand people that morning to help us with the spreading the mulch during the family build and it was  amazing part warming thing at the same time they still collecting food the for the food pantry so so thank you john i mean just incredible effort there in addition to belmont serves we have fifty different groups all over town who participated some of them were businesses they were civic organizations we had a slew of sports teams sitting bringing their kids on the day that i watched football team march across the field was just it was like  list them all and i can't list them all because there's just too many of them people talk to their employers and their employer sent a group of people out so it was and i'm a and we knew that this was crucial that we would never get a you know we thought a thousand people we need we got two thousand women and we knew we'd never get all those people out there unless there were lots and lots of people asking so they didn't have to just hear about it but they had to know that their friends were coming and that i could go home and i can volunteer with my friends i'm going to have a lot of fun so there's all the fun all right so we now have a little slide show for you and that's really minutes long and this is going to show the faces of many of these volunteers and then we have some conclusion concluding remarks after  so a few closing remarks we wanted to share a lot of the numbers with you because we feel like that conveys the scale of the project but while the enormity of those numbers is staggering at least to us going we feel like that doesn't begin to tell the story of this project and this process and the most profound aspect of it was something tangible and it was really more emotional it was a project that was about a community coming together and working together and creating something really beautiful and magical that will hopefully be enjoyed by many generations to come so we have a tremendous sense of pride ownership and it was an incredible experience allan talked earlier about the friendships that were formed through this on so many different levels there was a real positive energy throughout this project and i think that that was very contagious and that really helped to ok well it's funny that you have i said i am very interested in your i love snapfish and i put together books so when we have time over people question yes so she wants to know when we're going to write this up and publish it and i would like to and i think we're iris steering committee has taken a little bit of a break to get back to other aspects of our lives but starting next week we're meeting again regularly between now and the spring cleaning from other events and that is one of the things that we'd like to do is talk about how we're going to document this and i would like to create a book of some kind to give you in a way i'd like to personally have and i think other people would too i think it was a nice timing to ask you guys come because you get you have a little time to think about it and you could start planning for  yes the c p a was amazing we were in the first batch of projects it was funded through the c p a we got very lucky with the timing on the c p u committee was great to work with but you know when we went into it we knew that we wanted to make this a public private partnership and thankfully with the c p a there is a source of funds that could provide the public piece of that because as we all know there's not enough money to do everything we want to do in town we also then had a big huge focus on fundraising because we knew the c p m was going to pay for the whole thing hope we did a lot of effort on large donors there was a large portion i mean i don't have it exactly broken down but probably about two hundred thousand of the three fifty that we raised was large donors but  probably one hundred fifty of it was grassroots and so the the the what kicks that off and we had sixty thousand dollars raised and tons of people participate but we also did a brick program where people can sponsor bricks people can sponsor benches people who give us donate other you know much donations and so that's been going on for quite a long time what's interesting is that people don't do all of those things at the same time even when you send out an e mail and say there's a deadline coming they still don't know and so we have to say that last january you know we and build a part create a community as a title and really i mean we started out from the very beginning knowing that we had to be rebuild the park that we had to honor what had been there before and that we wanted to do it in a way that really focused on community building and we did through this wretched thing yeah so eleanor was involved in this from the very beginning because she was at the time president of the p t a and so this fell on the p t a laugh and i came on board because i'm an architect and i design among other things we specialize in children's environments and learning environment so i've designed many playgrounds and still continue to so when this happened if i go well this is a project i need to get involved in that we met early on in the project and when we talk about friendship i think ours is one of those friendships that it was born out of this project and we're still talking to you just because people are amazed on how mean only days after this was finished and we took our kids trick or treating together and we went to somebody's house for people like look thank you so much again and because volunteers were so much part of what you guys did i thought i'd also thank the volunteers that helped make today work so jane lyon for years has taken the registration and thank you our nice badges trish me and let's see there were a whole bunch of people who helped behind the scenes penny started organizing way before i started thinking about it and  there were a whole bunch of people here helping to set the table and make coffee and we've learned we're not pros have all of that but diane and julie and i can't even remember everybody  bought them and all the people who helped make today happen you're entitle to take one of the little flowers on the table something and thank you all again for coming this was a wonderful day we didn't have to worry about snow it's sunny  and we have a record attendance