Sponsored content from KABOOM!. Sponsored content policy

When Richard Louv published a book in 2005, he coined the term nature deficit disorder. He did so “to serve as a description of the human costs of alienation from nature … as a way to talk about an urgent problem that many of us knew was growing, but had no language to describe it,” Louv wrote on his blog. His book focused on kids and “the term caught on and is now a rallying cry for an international movement to connect children to [the] rest of nature.”

Recent research not only backs up Luve’s term, but highlights how ongoing the issue is: human connection to nature has decreased by just over 60% since 1800, while nature-related words like river, meadow, and dew have been disappearing from books.

A new toolkit from KABOOM!, a national nonprofit working to address playspace inequity, was designed to help close that yawning gap.

In collaboration with the Children & Nature Network, a nonprofit that works to connect kids to nature, and the National League of Cities, a coalition of cities working to improve life for their constituents, KABOOM! released the Nature Exploration Area Toolkit.

By integrating natural elements like logs, boulders, native plants and more into playspaces, Nature Exploration Areas (NEAs) combine play with nature through unstructured and sensory-rich elements that keep kids connected to the outdoors by bringing nature to them and the playspaces they frequent.

Connecting kids to nature is important and impactful on its own, but integrating NEAs into new and existing playspaces does more than that. Nature Exploration Areas deliver a unique type of play experience that supports climate resilience, too. Plus, they’re often a cost-effective option, too.

“When places are well designed with natural features, there are opportunities for children to explore, discover, hide out, and have a sense of playfulness. Nature Exploration Areas are really a combination of all these different elements to inspire discovery, learning, and play. We can pique the senses while also creating opportunities for reflection and social time. When designed right and in the right locations, we can create opportunities for children and families to gather and have these experiences,” explains Monica Lopez Magee, chief program, research, and policy officer at Children and Nature Network.

It’s the myriad benefits that stem from Nature Exploration Areas and the opportunities they open up for kids and families that prompted KABOOM! and company to create a toolkit to help communities build them.

The toolkit is a crash course in creating and integrating NEAs into playspaces. It covers engaging local communities in playspace design, how to select climate-adapted and equity-driven sites, tips for funding and sustainability planning, and rich and robust research on the health, educational, and environmental outcomes.

Child development is baked into the toolkit the way it is into the work of KABOOM! and its collaborators.

“Any time we’re creating a Nature Exploration Area, the first question is, who is this space for?” Lopez Magee says. “Older children need more places for socializing and gathering. For younger children, we want to ensure that play elements are there.”

Beyond all the information that practitioners and designers need to create a thoughtful and well-designed Nature Exploration Area, the toolkit also offers detailed case studies from Austin, Oakland, Providence, and San Francisco to highlight what’s worked elsewhere and give readers a sense of what’s possible.

Austin was a natural pick since, as Melody Alcazar—the program manager for Cities Connecting Children to Nature in Austin’s Parks and Recreation Department—explains, Austin has been deliberately working to increase access to nature since it was chosen to be a Cities Connecting Children to Nature pilot site in 2016.

“The early years were spent drafting an implementation plan, doing a lot of community surveying, and trying to figure out how people already access nature and how they might want to access it in the future,” Alcazar explains. That expertise is baked into the NEA Toolkit that Alcazar helped review.

“[The toolkit] is the type of thing that I wish was around 10 years ago because it would have made a huge difference in what we as a city have been able to do. We’ve done a lot in a short amount of time. If a lot of that had already been created, we would not have probably had to do it ourselves,” she says.

Providence is another trailblazer city whose experience shines through the toolkit.

When Wendy Nilsson became Providence’s Superintendent of Parks in 2015, she quickly began developing the department’s strategic plan and “bringing in nature was really, really important,” Nilsson says.

Thanks to grant funding the department was able to hire a landscape architect, a position Nilsson describes as a pivotal one that “enabled us to do things lighter, quicker, and cheaper, but also to design standards that [reflect] what we felt, in terms of research, was the best way for kids to play and connect to nature—crawling on logs and using their imaginations in natural landscaping rather than just going up and down a slide,” she adds.

Nilsson praises the NEA Toolkit for having “the science—all of the information that validates why we do what we do versus leading with it being the right thing to do. It quantifies and qualifies it. That’s really important—it’s all there so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”

You don’t have to work in the parks department, or even a city department, to benefit from the free toolkit, though. Whether you’re a planner, policymaker, educator, or advocate, the Nature Exploration Area Toolkit is designed to help you create greener and healthier public spaces.

DOWNLOAD THE NEA TOOLKIT

This post was originally published on Next City.