Solano PLAY

Solano PLAY held its kickoff event – a spring celebration and egg hunt – in the Solano Playlot on April 3, 2010.  With three weeks’ notice and 15 volunteers, we created an amazingly successful and fun event for kids.  Our outreach efforts, including hand delivering flyers to every house and apartment within 3 blocks of the park and emails to neighborhood email lists, yielded an estimated 200 attendees.  We organized a visit from our local fire truck, face painting, coloring activities, an egg hunt for tots and for older kids, sack races and several other games, and two piñatas.  We also had a “design your own Solano Playlot” activity and survey for capturing people’s input on what should go in a redesigned Solano Playlot.  (In case you missed it, you can fill one out, too, by visiting Your Ideas Matter page on this site.)

Recognizing the importance of our city’s support and involvement, we invited several elected officials and were honored to have Richmond’s Mayor McLaughlin speak. Other city officials in attendance were city council members Myrna Lopez and Nat Bates and Park and Recreation commissioner Corky Booze.  We would like to thank all of them for joining us and supporting our efforts. (Council member Bates gets a special thank you for donating enough candy to fill our piñatas and more.)

One of our volunteers reached out to local merchants for donations, and with these we held a bake sale and raffle, the proceeds from which more than covered our expenses. For their generous contributions, we would like to thank the Catahoula Coffee, Boilerhouse, Rubicon Bakery, Zoe’s Cookies and Safeway.

To see photos from the event, please visit our Photos page.

The success of this event speaks to the level of support and interest our community has for our efforts to improve the Solano Playlot.