KaBOOM!: A Movement to Save Play - Softcover

Hammond, Darell

 
9781609619244: KaBOOM!: A Movement to Save Play
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1609619242 ISBN 13: 9781609619244
Verlag: Rodale Books, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

This New York Times bestseller is a powerfully moving story of a man from humble beginnings, who identified a tragic problem and figured out how to address it on a national scale.

KaBoom chronicles Darell Hammond's amazing journey from a childhood spent living in a group home in Illinois to becoming the founder and CEO of KaBOOM!, one of the most successful nonprofit organizations in the United States. KaBOOM! has raised almost $200 million, directly built 1,743 playgrounds with a million volunteers, and has touched the lives of countless children and families. More than just a memoir, KaBoom is a call to action that will inspire readers by challenging them to rethink traditional notions of community and social change.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

DARELL HAMMOND is the founder and CEO of KaBOOM!, an innovative nonprofit based in Washington, DC, that brings volunteers and community members together to build playgrounds for children across the country. Founded out of Hammond's apartment in 1996, KaBOOM! has raised $200 million, rallied a million volunteers, led the hands-on construction of 2,000 playgrounds, and inspired a movement for the child's right to play. Darell and his wife, Kate, reside in Washington, DC.

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1

Looking Out for Other People

A lot of mental health professionals talk about "breaking the cycle"--that is, trying to prevent people who grow up in an unhealthy environment from repeating the same problems as adults and teaching those same behaviors to their kids. For me, this idea has an extremely powerful meaning.

My father was one of 16 children. Today the word would be "dysfunctional," but back then the family was probably just called "bad." The state of Nebraska certainly thought so: It took all 16 children from their parents-- my grandparents--who were declared unfit. (At the time there were only 15 of them, but my father's mother was pregnant with the 16th.) When my grandparents were later given a chance to get their kids back, they said no.

The state did what it could to keep the siblings together, but with a family that big, it was impossible. Four or five of the older boys were too old for an orphanage and got sent to a reform school instead. My father was raised by foster parents and later joined the Marines, where he served for 9 years. But the cycle would continue. Many of his brothers and sisters went on to have huge families: seven children, 13 children. One of my uncles had 11 kids from three different marriages.

There were eight of us. I was born in 1971, the second youngest. At that time we were living in Jerome, Idaho, a tiny town in the southern part of the state, but my family had moved around a lot back then, and most of my older siblings had been born somewhere else. We moved so often, partly so that my father could find work, but from what I understand, I think it was also to escape growing debts. The family lived in a few places in northern California and then moved on to Idaho. We ended up in Jerome because my father got a job as a ranch hand there around 1970. He had long worked with horses. A mustang kick once broke his right leg in two places below the knee.

Not long after we got to Jerome, he found a job as a long-haul trucker, a job that would take him away from us for days at a time. In October 1972, when I was 19 months old and my younger sister was a newborn, my father said he was going to unload a truck, and he never came back.

My mom was left trying to raise eight children by herself. She worked multiple jobs--one at a senior center, another with the Girl Scouts--but the bills began to pile up. According to what my older siblings tell me, we became the town charity. On holidays, my mother often had to work, so we were left on our own for Thanksgiving and Christmas. A lot of nights, our dinner was sandwiches of butter and sugar on white bread. The older kids started skipping school, ostensibly to take care of the younger ones, but they sometimes ended up getting into trouble, and their frequent absences eventually got the attention of social workers. The struggle became too much for my mother, and the county threatened to take us from her and split up the family. They talked about putting us in foster care--the cycle repeating. Instead, we all wound up at an institution called Mooseheart, 43 miles due west of Chicago and, at the time, surrounded by farmland.

Mooseheart is a storied place. It was founded in 1913 by Moose International, the fraternal organization that dates back to the late 1800s. Moose is similar to the Elks Lodge--the story goes that the founder wanted a mascot that was bigger than an elk, so he opted for a moose. Today the organization still has more than a million members, mostly in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. The Moose members still provide virtually all of the funding for Mooseheart along with a similar facility outside of Jacksonville, Florida, for senior citizens. About $28 of each member's annual dues is allocated to fund the two facilities; they represent the main charities that Moose supports. And at a time when school districts across the country are cutting their budgets, eliminating sports teams, laying off teachers, and getting rid of music and art programs, Moose members are still giving their all to Mooseheart, which hasn't had to take any of these steps.

During most of the 20th century, Mooseheart was seen as a kind of insurance policy for members of the fraternity. If something happened to you, your children could go there and be taken care of. They'd be raised in a safe environment, and they'd get an education. At its height, during the Depression, Mooseheart housed more than 1,200 kids, but by the time I showed up the attendance was more like 300; it's down to about 250 today.

The campus looks more like a college than an orphanage or group home, with about 1,200 acres of lush lawns, a lake, and residence halls that look more like private homes (a significant upgrade from the barracks-style living arrangements of my early days at Mooseheart, where at times we had 24 boys sleeping in a single room). For decades the facility operated its own post office and fire department and even generated its own electricity. It also maintained a farm and dairy, where a lot of the food for the kids was grown and raised, though in recent years remote slices of the land have been sold off, including the farm, to help cover operating costs.

More than 11,000 kids have come through Mooseheart in its nearly 100 years of operation. During the first 60 or 70 years, the institution accepted children only if their parents were members of Moose International. Eventually that policy was relaxed to allow more distant family, as long as they had some relation to a member. (In my case it was an uncle, our mother's brother.) And in 1994, membership in the fraternity stopped being a requirement at all. Families now apply, and if a child's need is deemed legitimate, if he or she can abide by the rules and guidelines of the facility, and if there is space, they're in.

My earliest memory is the 1,600-mile flight from Idaho to Chicago. I was 4 years old, and I spent the flight curled up on the floor to try and escape the cigarette smoke that hung heavy in the air. I hate that smell to this day.

When my family landed at O'Hare, people from the Mooseheart staff picked us up in two station wagons for the hour-long drive west to the campus, near Aurora, Illinois. Once we got there, my siblings and I spent a few weeks living together in a single dorm building, called Arizona Hall, where we learned the rules of the place and got all our vaccinations. After that we were split up by age and sent to different "houses," which is what the residence halls are called. That term is pretty accurate--they're much more like houses than dorms. Most are named for the state Moose association and chapter that raised the money to build and maintain them. I initially lived in what they called Baby Village. The houses are organized by age and gender, so you move a lot, typically every year when you're younger and every 2 years once you're older. That arrangement meant that I never lived with any of my brothers or sisters during my 14 years at Mooseheart.

When people find out I grew up in a place like this, they always assume I'm an orphan. It's a reasonable assumption, but it isn't accurate in my case. All eight of us arrived escorted by our mom. A great element of Mooseheart back then was that mothers were allowed to live on the campus if they wanted to remain close to their children, and our mom did. She stayed there until my younger sister, the last Hammond kid, graduated from Mooseheart High School nearly 15 years later.

Some might imagine an orphanage to be miserable, like something out of a Charles Dickens novel. But I'm very lucky to have been raised at Mooseheart. Our upbringing certainly was unusual and probably more disciplined than most, largely due to the complex logistics of raising a few hundred children together. The limits and strict rules of Mooseheart were good for me, and I imagine good for most...

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Verlag
Rodale Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2012
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1609619242
ISBN 13 
9781609619244
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchbär
info@buchbaer.de

Weberstr. 67
Osnabrück
49084
Deutschland

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