A stretch of blacktop at Camden's Malandra Hall Community Center looked completely different by the end of the day: a double-chute jungle gym, a twister game painted right onto the asphalt, and play equipment built from ideas that neighborhood kids had sketched out themselves. Community members and city Department of Public Works crews worked side by side to put it all together, incorporating ideas from children's drawings of their dream playspaces into a space they could actually climb on.
The build, reported by TAPinto, used prefabricated parts — including the slide for that double-chute jungle gym — as crews assembled a full playground in a single day. The Malandra Hall Community Center sits on Merrimac Road, and the city reported that community members themselves led the creation of the playground, with its design informed by drawings Camden children had shared of their ideal play spaces.
The model behind the one-day build comes from KABOOM!, a Maryland-based nonprofit whose Community-Built Playspaces program has communities lead the design, planning, and construction of new playgrounds alongside KABOOM! and its funding partners. The organization’s own description of the approach puts it plainly: participants will “lead a process that will center your community’s voices — both kids and adults — to design, plan, and build a new playspace,” according to kaboom.org.
Where the Name Comes From
KABOOM!'s name reportedly traces back to the idea of a full playground going up through community effort in a single day, and the Camden build followed that same script. The organization was founded by Darell Hammond, who later wrote about the effort in his 2011 book, Kaboom!: How One Man Built a Movement to Save Play. Per the seed facts in this story, KABOOM! has spent 30 years building playspaces especially for minority and low-income communities.
That mission has scaled considerably since the group's 1996 founding. KABOOM! says it has built or improved more than 17,000 playspaces nationwide and engaged more than 1.5 million community members, according to volunteer.kaboom.org. The organization, which lists its address in Bethesda, Maryland, is marking its 30th year of operation in 2026, per a release tied to a separate project in Salem.
A City Weighing the Cost of Play
Camden City estimated the two playgrounds tied to this project — Malandra Hall and an upcoming build at Dudley Grange Park — would cost a combined $750,000, with an anonymous donor reportedly covering that cost, the city told TAPinto. The city also said children today face mounting pressures from limited access to playspaces and nature, along with mental health challenges and rising screen time, making structured play more critical than it has been in the past.
KABOOM! frames that urgency in developmental terms, too. The organization has stated that early childhood experiences shape children's cognitive abilities, emotional resilience, and long-term health outcomes, per its annual report, and separately says its playspaces deliver the physical, social, and emotional health benefits of play, according to kaboom.org. Communities that take part are also expected to accept ownership and maintenance responsibilities for the playspace once it's finished, per the same source.
Next Stop: Dudley Grange Park
Workers are scheduled to build a new playground at Dudley Grange Park, located on Federal Street in Camden, next Saturday. That timing points to a build date of October 31, based on the “next Saturday” reference in city reporting, though that specific date has not been independently confirmed elsewhere.
Camden's build is part of a broader pattern of kid-designed, community-built playgrounds across New Jersey. In Paulsboro, about 130 volunteers — including workers with Atlantic City Electric — built a new playground at Buck Street Park in roughly six hours in April 2024, according to CBS Philadelphia. Local students had designed that playground themselves back in January, and adults built the equipment based directly on the kids' suggestions. A separate account of that April 2024 build put the volunteer total from Atlantic City Electric alone at more than 80 people, including members of IBEW Local 210, per Gateway Community Action Partnership.
Further south in Salem, kids celebrated the opening of their own kid-designed, community-built playground at Hubbell Park this past week — described as the city's first ADA-accessible playspace, expected to serve more than 600 students and hundreds more children across the community. The CarMax Foundation provided the majority of the funding for that project through its partnership with KABOOM!, according to a release distributed via GlobeNewswire.
Camden County, meanwhile, is pursuing a different kind of inclusive play space nearby. The county announced construction of a third all-inclusive Jake's Place playground at New Camden Park in Camden City, funded in part by an $883,000 grant from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. That project will include roughly 9,000 square feet of poured-in-place rubber protective surfacing and is designed so children of all physical abilities can play together, according to Camden County's announcement.
