The Home Depot® Foundation today announced that it will continue its partnership with KaBOOM!, the national non-profit dedicated to bringing play back into the lives of children. The Home Depot is a founding partner of KaBOOM!, and the organizations have been working together since 1996 to build playgrounds and playing fields across North America. In addition to building great places for children to play, the partnership will focus on creating and sharing sustainable practices for a wide array of volunteer initiatives.
In 2009, KaBOOM! and The Home Depot Foundation will create 57 sustainable places to play, activate approximately 7,000 Team Depot associate-volunteers and 4,000 community volunteers so that over the lifetime of the playgrounds, more than 570,000 children will have a great place to go outside and play.
Three of these playgrounds will be ‘green’ playground pilot projects, created with new types of sustainable manufactured equipment. This year, the organizations are adding a new focus on reducing the environmental impact of the design, production, building and maintenance of the play area. Each project will also include an environmental education curriculum to teach approximately 14,250 community leaders, Team Depot associate-volunteers and children about ways to minimize the environmental impact of any community development project.
This new phase of the partnership will also create and disseminate sustainable practices for any volunteer-based initiatives. The Home Depot Foundation and KaBOOM! will undertake research, education and outreach initiatives to create, record and share sustainable volunteer practices. These practices will then serve as a green road map to help guide common volunteer projects towards creating a more environmentally friendly work process and end product.
“The Home Depot has been working with KaBOOM! for more than a decade, so we’re proud to continue this partnership and expand its goals. Now, not only will our associates work side by side with members of the community building great places for kids to play, they’ll be creating sustainable, green areas where children and their parents can gather to appreciate nature and learn how to protect the environment,” said Kelly Caffarelli, president of The Home Depot Foundation.
Darell Hammond, CEO and Co-Founder of KaBOOM! said, “We are proud to be extending one of the longest, and certainly the largest, public private partnerships with The Home Depot Foundation. This new focus on sustainability will enable KaBOOM! to use our capacity to activate volunteers to make the world a better place for everybody, including the kids.”