Trips to the playground haven’t alway been joyful for Carmela Abraham and her family.
While two of her children would go out and play, her oldest, Sydney, often had to stay behind. Sydney has cerebral palsy. She is legally deaf and blind and has seizure disorder and muscular scoliosis. At the playground, she would stay behind with mom and watch her younger siblings play.
“Sydney couldn’t participate. And it made my other kids feel bad. They would say, ‘Can’t Sydney go on a swing?’ But no, because she’d fall out,” Abraham said.
Sydney, 24, is now making up for the lost time. Abraham recalled in an interview a recent trip to the Magical Bridge Playground in Mitchell Park in which Sydney began belting out “Hey, Soul Sister!” by her favorite rock band, Train. Before long, a teenager looked at her, approached her and joined her in singing.
“She had no idea who this person was, but she was very appreciative,” Abraham said.
Such moments have become increasingly common at Palo Alto’s all-inclusive playground, which was completed in 2015 and which is now home to a concert series, theater productions and various classes and activities managed by “kindness ambassadors.” They are also becoming common around the county and the region. The Magical Bridge Foundation, which is spreading the gospel of universally accessible playgrounds, just saw Santa Clara open its first Magical Bridge playground. Redwood City has one, funded and supported by city staff. Mountain View is preparing to open a Magical Bridge playground in early November, aided in part by a $900,000 contribution from Google funds that the Magical Bridge Foundation helped arrange.
In Palo Alto, where the magic started, the city earlier this month formalized its partnership with the Magical Bridge Foundation by committing $150,000 in annual funding to support Magical Bridge’s “Kindness Ambassador Program,” a volunteer system that invites adults and teens of all abilities to “promote kindness and inclusion on and off the playground,” according to a report from the Department of Community Services. The contribution comes from a $265,000 fund that the City Council approved earlier this year to support citywide special events.
Abraham, who lives in Palo Alto, calls the playground a game changer for families and children whose needs have historically been neglected by local recreation programs and facilities.
“How people view disabled people can change if they get a chance to interact with them in a setting that is positive for everyone,” Abraham said. “The only time the kids see disabled kids in a lot of scenarios is when they’re unhappy — they’re struggling in school, trying to fit in, getting teased. And on the playground, it’s amazing to have other kids come up to Sydney when she’s singing.”
BRIDGING THE GAP
At the center of it all is Olenka Villarreal, a Palo Alto mom with a tech background who launched the first playground in her hometown to give her daughter, Ava, a place to play.
“Playgrounds should be a reflection of the community we live in,” Villarreal said in an interview. “It’s parents, its older adults, its visible and invisible disabilities. It’s a gathering place for everyone.”
At the time that she started fundraising and planning the playground, none of Palo Alto’s 34 playgrounds could accommodate Ava and other community members with disabilities. The new Magical Bridge playgrounds, here and elsewhere, include playhouses for performances and zones for spinning, swinging, sliding or simply getting away from the noise for peace of mind, a valuable amenity for children with autism.
The playgrounds have evolved as Villarreal and her team applied lessons learned from existing playgrounds to new ones. When they were designing the Palo Alto playground, her team rifled through catalogs to see what types of inclusive products are available to help children who want to get away from the noise. They stumbled upon a “Cozy Cocoon,” a plastic, blue enclosure that a child can sit inside.
The solution had some flaws, however. It’s not wheelchair friendly and the chunky plastic wasn’t particularly pleasant from a sensory standpoint. The newer playgrounds have at least three “hideaway huts,” enclosures that can accommodate children and adults and that fulfill the same function but in a more effective way.
“It’s wheelchair friendly, has a soothing color, sensory elements and bench,” Villarreal said. “They can see out at what’s going on, but they don’t hear the noise as much. There’s no stigma. You sit there and enjoy it.”
Another example is the 24-string “laser harp,” which can be found in Palo Alto, Redwood City and Morgan Hill. Visitors who move through the harp hear musical notes play through the speakers in the exhibit. Villarreal said that these harps have been tuned to pentatonic scale, which has been shown to be more soothing for people with autism.
“We’ve learned a tremendous amount,” she said.
In addition to offering children a chance to play, the playgrounds also offer parents an opportunity to network, said Abraham. She recalled her recent conversation with a woman whose 5-year-old child is blind and who wanted to learn more about available resources.
“This may sound crazy, but we may be the most disconnected community I’ve ever been a part of,” she said. “Part of that is because every kid is unique in their disability and there are very few people that you meet through your kid’s services because your kid’s services are one-on-one.”
The success of Palo Alto’s playground caught the attention of county leaders, who were eager to replicate it elsewhere. In 2017, Santa Clara County Supervisor Joe Simitian spearheaded the All-Inclusion Playground Grant, which allocated $2 million in matching grants each of the county’s five districts for similar playgrounds. Last fall, the county revived the program and made an additional $10 million in matching grants.
“Playgrounds are important places for recreation and community building,” Simitian said in a statement announcing the grants. “They can also be therapeutic for children with disabilities, who, like all children, benefit from the developmental milestones experienced through playing. What’s more, all-inclusive playgrounds promote understanding between neighbors with and without disabilities as they’re places everyone can enjoy and play.”
Other cities and counties have also taken notice. In December 2020, Redwood City celebrated the opening of its first Magical Bridge playground at Red Morton Park, a $6.8 million project that was bolstered by city funds and fundraising from the Magical Bridge Foundation. Daly City is now planning to open a Magical Bridge playground in Hillside Park.
“Every time we get a Magical Bridge in the community, it’s almost like a light shines on the fact that there are many families who haven’t been included in something as simple as a playground,” Villarreal said.
BEYOND THE PLAYGROUND
Her efforts are also being recognized internationally. The Magical Bridge Foundation had signed a licensing agreement for an all-inclusive playground in Hamilton, New Zealand. The playground opened in December of last year.
All these playgrounds share an ideal but differ in the details. In Palo Alto, the ambassadors are mostly volunteers and teenagers. In Redwood City, city staff are more involved in the project and playground volunteers are mostly adults. In New Zealand, the ambassador function is performed by members of the indigenous Maori community.
The spirit of inclusiveness is also spreading at local schools, where Magical Bridge clubs have formed to further the foundation’s mission of inclusiveness. Emma Villarreal, Olenka’s older daughter, now 24, helped form one when she was a student at Palo Alto High School. Since then, other schools, including Nueva School and Los Altos High, have formed similar clubs. Emma, who had worked as a research assistant at the Stanford Center of Biomedical Ethics, is now working as the Magical Bridge Foundation’s community services director.
“They’re being replicated at different high schools and then the kids are really creative and I think we are inspiring more inclusive communities,” Emma said.
As the foundation’s curator of community kindness, Harriet Stern oversees the organization’s growing network of volunteers. There are about 65 people on the organization’s roster, about 20 of whom are regularly active in playground activities. She recalled several recent events, including students from Nueva School who came for a Magical Music series that allowed children to play the keyboard or strike a few chords on a ukulele. Teenagers from Los Altos helped form the Magical Tennis series, where they coach children with special needs to play tennis.
“They do miraculous things,” Stern said in an interview. “Kids that couldn’t hold a racket in the beginning, at the end of 10 sessions they are running around the court and hitting it over the net.”
Last year, the foundation hired Maia Scott, a visually impaired artist, to run two art-and-craft workshops. The event had more than 100 children making magic wands and hero capes. Most had no idea Scott was blind, Stern said.
“By the end of the program, all the participants knew and hopefully will always remember that blind people are visual artists or teachers or could be anyone in your community,” Stern said. “Normalizing disability is another one of our Magical Bridge goals.”
Not every project has gone as planned. In Mountain View, the project advanced after a protracted dispute over fees that the foundation was expecting to receive from the city for its fundraising work. The Google contribution, which Villarreal said her organization helped arrange, ended up being given directly to the city, bypassing the foundation and depriving it of the fees that it typically receives.
And not every city has been particularly receptive to opening a playground. Kris Loew, the foundation’s chief marketing officer, said her group has struggled to get the cities of Los Altos and Atherton on board to create Magical Bridge playgrounds.
“They don’t want a busy playground in their community,” Loew said in an interview. “I hear that loud and clear in Los Altos and Atherton. They love the idea and understand the importance of Magical Bridge, but they don’t want the busyness in their cities and the traffic and the onslaught of people attracted to the playground.”
As the foundation looks for new opportunities to spread the magic to other communities, it is also evolving its offerings in Palo Alto. Loew said one of its key goals is to make these playgrounds welcoming spaces for people of all ages, including seniors. Rather than having swings with bucket seats that are too small for adults, the playgrounds have bench swings that can accommodate anyone. The Santa Clara playground has an entire fitness area for adults, she said.
Ironically, its overarching goal is to make its special places more normal — so normal that visitors would barely notice that they are special. Emma Villarreal wants to see more events — concerts, classes, yoga sessions — that would attract anyone and everyone, including people her age. These events won’t be seen catering to people with disabilities. Rather, they would be “seamlessly inclusive.”
“It just should be normal,” she said.
Stern shares this goal. She recalled a recent “relaxed performance” of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” that the theater group Palo Alto Players put on at Lucie Stern Community Center. In this non-traditional setting, interruptions are not frowned upon and kindness ambassadors were available in the lobby to assist visitors who want to get away for a little quiet time.
Stern said that every theater company has the capability of doing these types of performances. Most just hadn’t thought about it.
It’s not just theater companies. Stern said the foundation hopes to teach the next generation of city planners, politicians, architects and heath care workers. It also wants to bring principles of “universal design” to elementary, middle and high school students.
“I’ve grown so much in my heart because of this role and my interactions with teens and different communities,” Stern said. “But there’s even more to do. So much more to do.”
