PLAY Denver

PLAY Denver is a non-profit organization with the goal to provide moments of joy for unprivileged youth in our community and beyond. We are a group of high school students who started a non-profit because we understand, first hand, the stress living in poverty can cause a child and we believe that providing opportunities for play is essential to combating that stress. We use underutilized spaces to inspire play.

Our next large project is creating "play stations" at bus stops throughout the city of Denver. At these play stations; we would provide safe, stationary opportunities for children to play while they are waiting for the bus with their parents. We would like to use this grant money to make bus stops in Denver more child friendly.

1. We are in the process of working with our Regional Transportation District (RTD) to find out which bus stops in the Denver area are the most used by children or are in need of the most improvement.

2. We will then work with our team, which includes consults from neighborhood children, to design child friendly bus stops using green materials.

3. We will host community clean up days at bus stop locations to clean, paint and build play structures.

4. We will maintain the bus stops with help from RTD.

Children living in poverty can spend up to 3 hours a day waiting for the bus. The bus stops are grimy, grey and sad. We would like to change that. Waiting for the bus does not have to be a miserable, boring experience. As Denver and other cities move toward expanding greener methods of transportation, we must use this as an opportunity to make the new method a fun option that inspires play for everyone!