Playground Coming Spring 2025!

Rise Above Foundation and the Massachusetts Department of Children & Families (DCF) are partnering to build a playground that will strengthen family connections and promote healthy play. The playground will be at DCF’s Leominster Area Office and will serve children of all ages and abilities. The play area will accommodate multiple families at once and provide a safe, healthy, and developmentally appropriate space for families who are involved with DCF to have visits with their children.

Strengthening families:

Family time allows children and parents to maintain and strengthen bonds, which is critical when they are separated due to out-of-home care. It also provides opportunities for caseworkers to assess the parent-child relationship and determine how to support it, if needed. Research has shown that family time can help lead to reunification, reduce time in out-of-home care, and reduce child behavior problems.

The power of play:

The United Nations High Commission on Human Rights recognized play as a fundamental right of every child. Play with parents sets the stage for children’s ability to successfully play with peers. Play can help children heal from trauma, helping them regulate emotions, providing an outlet to deal with stress in the moment, allowing them to revisit and understand disturbing experiences after the fact, and giving them tools to cope with distress in the future. Several studies have found pretend play to be positively related to coping and emotion regulation.

Leading the way for the state:

The Children’s Bureau (a division of the U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services) has recommended that state child welfare agencies utilize non-threatening, natural, family-like settings for visits to occur. The Bureau is encouraging states to work with community partners to identify more home-like settings for supervised visitation and to allow for parental participation in normal daily experiences of their children’s lives, like recreational activities. In 2021, Rise Above and DCF built the first playground of its kind on a Massachusetts DCF property in Worcester. We are proud to partner again to bring the state’s second dedicated family play space to DCF’s new office location in Leominster (move-in date TBD spring 2024).

Addressing an increasing need:

There are approximately 2,000 youth served by the Leominster DCF office each year, including 400 in foster care. The playground will support biological families in their journeys to reunite safety with their children. It will provide a private and safe environment to better allow for parents to be actively coached and mentored by social workers and parent aids, reducing stigma for children and parents, promoting trust and accelerating skill building.

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You can help make the Leominster DCF playground a reality!