Eight years without a playground.
Then one day.
In Oshawa, fifty children got back something their community lost in 2017 — and they designed it themselves. We built the website. Here is the part that actually matters.
In 2017 the play structure at Maple Glen Housing Co-operative was taken out. It had deteriorated to the point where it was no longer safe, so it was removed — which was the right call, and which left roughly fifty children with nowhere to play close to home.
It stayed that way for eight years.
That is the detail worth sitting with for a second. Not a funding announcement, not a consultation, not a phase. Just a flat patch of ground where a playground used to be, and a generation of kids at a forty-home co-op in Oshawa who grew up walking past it.
On 26 September 2026, about a hundred Foresters Financial employees joined KABOOM! and the Maple Glen community at 777 Wilson Road North and built a new one. In a single day.
The kids drew it first
This is the part we keep coming back to. Months before anyone picked up a tool, the children of Maple Glen were asked what they actually wanted, and they answered the way children answer — they drew it.
Those drawings were not a public-relations exercise that got quietly shelved. They shaped the real design. The climbing wall, the slide, the ramped entry that lets every child get up there: all of it traces back to paper that a kid at Maple Glen filled in.
Which means that when the ribbon was cut, the children holding it were not spectators at something done for them. They were looking at their own idea, built at full size, in their own yard.
“For years, our children have said, ‘I’m bored. There’s nowhere to play.’ Then they were given the chance to put their dreams on paper, drawing the playground they wished they had.”
“We can’t wait for ‘there’s nowhere to play’ to turn into ‘let’s go outside!’”
Laura Reid — Vice President, Maple Glen Housing Co-operativeWhat a build day actually looks like
It starts as bare dirt, stacked timber and uncut panels, and it is noisier and more chaotic than the finished photographs suggest. Everything you see below happened between sunrise and the ribbon.
What we did, and what we did not
We should be precise about this, because the easiest thing in the world would be to stand next to a story like this and let the glow settle on us.
The playground was built by KABOOM!, Foresters Financial and the Maple Glen community. Not by us. About a hundred volunteers did the physical work of turning a flat patch of ground into a playspace in a single day, and the design came from the children who live there.
What we did was smaller and much less photogenic. We built Maple Glen’s website — somewhere the community could tell its own story, point people at the fundraiser, and be found by neighbours who had no idea any of this was happening. We donated, and we helped push the GoFundMe.
That is the honest extent of it. A website does not build a playground. But a community trying to raise money for one needs somewhere to send people, something that looks like it is run by people who mean it, and a way for the story to travel further than the fifteen-minute walk around the co-op.
That is the work we are actually good at, and this is the kind of thing we want to point it at.
Why this one stayed with us
We spend most of our time on visibility and on security — helping organisations get found, and making sure growth does not quietly outrun their ability to protect what they have built. It is useful work and we like it.
But a co-operative is a particular kind of client. Maple Glen has been running since 1988, about forty homes, governed by a volunteer board of its own members. There is no marketing department. The people deciding how to spend a limited budget are the same people who live there, and every dollar spent on a website is a dollar not spent on something else that residents can see and touch.
Organisations like that are consistently underserved by our industry, usually for the unglamorous reason that the budgets are small. Which is exactly backwards: the smaller the organisation, the more a single good decision moves the needle.
Eight years is a long time in the life of an adult. In the life of a child it is most of one. Some of the kids who lost that playground in 2017 are teenagers now and will never use the new one.
The ones holding the ribbon will.
It is not finished being paid for
The structure is up and the children are on it. The co-op is still raising money for the surrounding work — the things that turn a playground into somewhere families actually sit and stay.
Their fundraiser is called From Empty Space to Amazing Place, which is a better line than anything we would have written for them.
Credit where it belongs. The playground at Maple Glen Housing Co-operative was built by KABOOM! and Foresters Financial with the Maple Glen community on 26 September 2026 — Foresters’ 179th playground, marking twenty years of partnership with KABOOM! and KABOOM!’s 30th anniversary. Redefine Logic Media built and maintains the co-operative’s website, contributed to the fundraiser, and helped promote it. We were not a build partner.
Sources and further reading: the official announcement is on PR Newswire, issued by The Independent Order of Foresters. Figures on the co-operative, the children served and the build are drawn from that release and from Maple Glen’s own site. The quotation from Laura Reid is reproduced from the release.
Photographs courtesy of Maple Glen Housing Co-operative. We have deliberately not named the children pictured.
If your organisation is doing something like this and the web side is the part nobody has time for, tell us about it. We do not take on everything, but we would rather hear about it than not.