When the Community First Church of God in Homeland was burned to the ground by an arsonist in 2016, Pastor Mike Gratzke said the decision was made not to rebuild the building but to rebuild the community. The church now hosts services on Sundays and serves as a community center every other day.
A new playground, built in five hours Saturday, Jan. 28, with the help of more than 150 volunteers, is the most recent addition to the center. As part of the commitment to the residents of Homeland, church members completed an application to KABOOM!, a nonprofit that builds playgrounds all over the country.
Headquartered in Washington, the organization has a team that works with different funding partners to build playgrounds where they are needed and requested. In this case they collaborated with Pacific Dental Services, one of the nation’s leading dental support organizations.
The church was the community partner component and supported about 10% of the financial cost and many church members pitched in to help. Laura Vicky Pleasant, who regularly assists with the church’s food bank program, helped give the center’s shed a fresh coat of paint.
Gratzke said it took about six to seven months of cooperative meetings with the community to finalize a design for the playground. Children were asked to draw their ideal playground and based on all the input, KABOOM! presented three designs for the church to choose from.
KABOOM! project manager Derrick Dixon and about five other company representatives were on site to oversee the project.
“We have built over 3,000 playgrounds since we started in 1996,” he said. “This is our first project of 2023; we’re kicking the year off with a bang.”
The playground was assembled on a 2,500 square foot area already chiseled out but filled with dirt. Volunteers from Mt. San Jacinto College and the church cleared it out a couple of days earlier to have it ready for construction. All the play space components that were decided on were concreted in using 110 80-pound bags of cement. The 155 cubic yards of engineered wood fiber was manually moved from one big pile and spread over the playground area with shovels.
“This job would have taken professional playground installers about four or five days to complete and you did it in five hours,” Dixon told the crowd after the project was completed.
He added that KABOOM! had scheduled six hours for the build but volunteers showed up early and in force that enabled them to complete it an hour ahead of schedule. The estimated cost of the build, just for materials, is about $100,000.
Children are not the only ones who will benefit from the project. Picnic tables and planter benches were constructed and placed in the courtyard area near the main entrance. The church already had a covered patio area where it served lunch to all the volunteers which provided a great view of the new playground for supervision purposes.
More than 150 volunteers from Pacific Dental Services worked on the customized playground. PDS, headquartered in Irvine, currently supports more than 2,600 dentists at more than 915 practices nationwide by providing business support and operational efficiencies while dental practice owners and clinicians can focus on healthcare excellence.
Carli Kingsley, senior manager of corporate social responsibility for PDS, said several dental offices in the area are PDS partners.
“A large number of team members live in or near this area so it was a perfect location for us to build a playground with KABOOM!,” she said. “Every community, and every group of kids, deserves a playground.”
Sarah Milik, corporate social responsibility assistant of PDS, was happy to be involved with the PDS Foundation’s Smile Generation Serve Day with the We Serve Team. Each year, they work with KABOOM! to identify a playground-needy region. Whoever is named Region of the Year for giving back to the community gets to have a team-building event that promotes service to their community.
“This is our 18th build with KABOOM!” Milik said. “This year’s (Inland Empire) winners chose to support this project.”
Kingsley said, “At PDS, we believe that high performance, great culture and great teams deserve the opportunity to create lasting legacies, so we use these playground builds as a way to say thank you to our team members who have gone above and beyond throughout the year.”
She said KABOOM! is one of the only nonprofits that provides opportunities like this where more than 150 volunteers can all have a hands-on role in a project. She said within 24 hours of the volunteer request going out, they had all they needed.
“To me, that speaks to the heart of service of all these individuals; it’s remarkable,” Kingsley said.
After completion of the playground, Gratzke thanked everyone who came and explained why they were “part of a miracle here in Homeland.” He said as he surveyed the damage the morning after the fire in 2016, he caught sight of a young boy with his mother outside the fenced-off area. The boy gave the pastor seven coins and that was considered the first offering.
“That 39 cents turned into $2 million to rebuild a broken community,” he said. “We have a lot of hardships here. Before the fire, we had a small food pantry that served 40 households a week. We are now serving more than 1,600 households and over 6,000 people monthly.”
Gratzke, who has been the church’s pastor since 2010, spent 10 years as a missionary pastor in Mexico alongside his wife Kim before returning to the United States. They thanked KABOOM! for all the logistics and administration throughout the project.
“It was a pleasure following your step-by-step instructions; you made it easy for us,” Gratzke said. “Now, Pacific Dental Services and Smile Generation, how awesome are you for being part of rebuilding a community? Thank you for being so generous and kind to the children of Homeland.”
Regional partner Kim Valko shared her appreciation with the volunteers.
“The lasting imprint that you will leave on this community will be felt for years to come,” Valko said.
Regional partner Lionel Clayton said, “I am truly blessed in my heart for this incredible day and this incredible event and we couldn’t have done it without each and every one of you.”
Kingsley told the group, “I feel truly inspired to go into 2023 with a heart full of service to give to others and to serve others. Thank you for inspiring me and I hope you all are inspired as well.”
For more information, visit http://www.homelandcog.org, http://www.kaboom.org and http://pacificdentalservices.com.
