Changing the Idea of Play Through Personal Empowerment that is Fun & Risky
Pop Up Park Buffalo is a grassroots organization committed to providing community-based “free-play” opportunities for kids in Buffalo and Western New York. In recent decades, opportunities for free-play have been greatly reduced due to parental fears, overscheduling of children, and a general feeling that children should not be on their own. Yet, evidence suggests that free-play is the very best life-lesson tool, and is vital to the growth and development of children into healthy and productive adults.
Being a teacher, an environmental activist, landscape architects, and a planner, we, as founders of Pop Up Buffalo, were specifically interested in creating an experience that fostered the next generation of inventors, philosophers, and designers. As parents, we were also interested in the personal empowerment of risky play and how we could create a free-play experience that parents and communities could be equally empowered in providing. In 2012, we came together to “change the state of play for just one day” and after a very successful event our concept of “Community Based Free-Play” was created. Our one-day experiment was so successful we were urged to continue, and in 2013 we went on to host five more Pop Up Park events in Buffalo and by 2015 we were under the umbrella of The Wellness Institute of Greater Buffalo & WNY, Inc., a non-profit incubator organization.