Project Spotlight

Welcome to Givewell's Project Spotlight. Each month we highlight a project for which a charity is currently seeking funds. We also provide details on how to give directly for this project.

Organisation:	St Lucy’s School
Project Name:	Grey to Play

Project description:

This month’s project spotlight, St Lucy’s School Grey to Play playground project, was a finalist in Givewell’s 2006 Best Community Project Award, and took a dull, lifeless space and transformed it into a colourful, engaging and educationally structured environment.

St. Lucy’s is a school and outreach service for children who are blind, vision impaired or who have other special needs. Located in Wahroonga, Sydney, with satellite classes at Narrabeen and Narraweena, its students come from a wide variety of locations across Sydney such as the North Shore, the inner West and the Central Coast.

Originally established as a school for the blind, St.Lucy’s now provides unique and innovative educational and life skill learning for children with a broad range of special needs. These may include children with Downs Syndrome, Autism and Cerebral Palsy to name a few.

Children with disabilities need a designed environment that will engage them in play because they do not have the capacity to generate games and play scripts without guidance from their surrounding environment like children without disabilities have.

St Lucy’s play “town” had the following objectives:

Be an environment which is easily “read” by children with disabilities. An easily read environment is one which has paths to lead children to known destinations, relieving children’s anxiety because they know what to do when they go out into that environment. In its play “town” roads and paths lead children to the outdoor café for their lunch, to the clothing shop for dress-ups, to the theatre for fantasy play, to the bike path for bike riding and to the petrol station for play with cars and trucks.
Provide small safe and secure playground areas for children who are anxious and who cannot yet assert themselves with others. These areas are also invaluable in helping children to learn to interact with others through learned play scripts like a train play script, a shop play script or a dress-up play script.
Provide life skills situations such as a road and pedestrian crossing with traffic lights to teach our children road safety
Be laid out so that its staff members on duty can readily supervise and oversee particular children’s activities and interactions.

St Lucy’s is an independent school and receives only partial funding: approximately 50-60% of costs are met by government funding; 40% of basic education needs plus all additional curriculum activities and special projects are supported by fundraising initiatives. The only way this crucial (innovative) life-changing playground could be provided was through fundraising events, donations and sponsorships.

The cost of constructing the new playground exceeded $400,000.

Can donors/grant makers give directly for this project? The Grey to Play playground project has been completed, but donors can give to St Lucy’s latest project which sees the school working hard on fundraising more than $3m for a ground-breaking Creative Arts Centre.

If so, how?

Donations to ‘St Lucy’s School’ are tax deductible.
Community support is very important to St. Lucy’s. Through volunteering, donating or remembering St Lucy’s in your will, you can help St Lucy’s to continue to support its students.

Contact details for further information:

For further information on supporting St Lucy’s please contact its Development Officer, Gailene Keen on (02) 9487 1277 or email gailenek@stlucys.org.au.

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