Smith Memorial Playground

What are some of your key responsibilities and roles at Smith playground?

There are certain big areas that I handle including overseeing operations of how things work, the upkeep of the facility, financial issues and troubleshooting on different issues. I am overall responsible for how things run here on a day-to-day basis.

What does your day to day look like at Smith?

It varies a lot from day-to-day as I do spend a fair amount of time in meetings with people, keeping an eye on the finances of the organization to make sure that we are able to pay everybody and run our operations smoothly. I have specific projects that I am working on myself, and I also support other people that work here and help them carry out their goals. Every day is a little bit different so it's hard to say what a typical day looks like, but it's usually filled with those kinds of things.

What is the experience like working for a non-profit organization?

I spent a lot of the early part of my career in for profit organizations, so it is only recently that I have worked for nonprofits, and it is a little bit different. What makes it different is that you are dependent upon other people believing in your mission and wanting to support your mission. Sometimes that is individuals, governments at the city, state, or federal level and sometimes that is foundations that believe in our mission. Every year we start from zero to find that support to cover the operations. Some organizations like us would charge people to use the facility so there would be an entrance fee, but we are free to everyone thus we have to look for ways to get money. We also try to make sure that as much of the money as possible is going towards serving the mission which is helping kids develop through play. Thus, we try to be more cautious about spending money than corporations would need to.

What ways do you raise funds to run Smith playground?

There are several ways that we get money; one is we ask for donations. When people come in, they do not have to pay to enter but we do have that cashbox sitting at the entrance and hope that people will put in donations as they are coming through. We also from time to time will do campaigns on social media or using e-mail specifically to ask people that we have in our database to give money to help support into the operations and we usually do that once or twice a year. Moreover, we have some fund-raising events, and we hold auctions. Other than that, we write and apply for grants. Sometimes we get grants for general operations and thus we can use them in any way we want to but other times the grants we receive are for projects and thus can only be used for the project and not for the running of Smith.

What are some of the challenges you face at Smith?

Applying for grants is usually a competitive process since there are a lot of people competing for the same dollars. Recently with the pandemic there are also organizations favoring some causes over others such as homelessness and food insecurity thus we got lower on the priority scale. We must convince people that we are also indirectly solving some of these issues. For example, we are not a food bank, but we bring 60 kids here for summer camp and we feed them two meals thus indirectly solving food insecurity. Sometimes when people hear the name Smith playground, they get a certain picture of kids swinging on swings and it is our job to be able to show that we are much more than that and we are addressing a lot of issues. For example, violence is a huge problem in this city and there is a definite indirect link between what we are doing in keeping kids occupied on and off the streets and educating parents on how to support their children. Another major challenge we are facing is staffing and finding people to work. We are nonprofit and, as I said, money is always an issue, thus we are not able to pay as much as a corporation would pay and the competition is tough.

How did you come up with the idea of the summer camp for kids and how long has it been run?

Last year was the first year that I am aware of that Smith had a camp on a large scale and it resulted from one of the founders of William Penn foundation who wanted to invest in programs that would help kids rebound and recover from COVID. Most of the kids that go to school in the Philadelphia school district were among the last kids to go back to in person learning so they spent well over a year learning virtually, many of them not necessarily having the type of Internet to be able to connect when things were virtual. We proposed the summer camp as a way that we would teach some literacy to help the kids catch up with learning. We chose literature because it is the basis for learning everything. Moreover, we also wanted to focus on mindfulness so that they would have tools to help regulate and manage the stress that they may have been going through during the pandemic.