PEORIA, Ill. – Children who visit the Greater Peoria Family YMCA have a new outdoor option for play.
The organization held a ribbon cutting ceremony Thursday afternoon for its new playground equipment on the YMCA campus. The equipment costs around $50,000 in total. $27,000 of that amount was funded with grants from Kaboom, the Rotary Club of Peoria, and Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Illinois.
YMCA President Andy Thornton says the playground is an important asset to the organization, as it provides more options for activities for youth programs and summer camps, of which there’s around 150 campers this year.
“They need a place like this to go and just have some free time. We have a lot of structured activities for them throughout the day. We do a lot of arts and crafts, a lot of steam activities, lot of physical activity. But they need to just burn off some energy and just have some free time and play for themselves,” Thornton said.
The equipment was built in just two days in late-May with volunteers from the Rotary Club, as well as students from Richwoods and Peoria Heights High Schools.
Thornton says the playground has been an asset that was missing at the YMCA.
“We’ve actually been without it for a couple years,” Thornton said. “Our old playground had gotten into disrepair, and we had to take it down, and we went a couple summers without it while we worked on the development of this. So we were happy to have it in place before the summer started this year.”
Thornton says the playground also gives the children who visit the YMCA the freedom to play in a space for them again.
