Kat Kuan

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storytime

Magical Bridge Playground: A Place for Everyone to Play

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It’s rare to find a place where everyone, regardless of age or ability, can come together and play. And that is why Magical Bridge Playground is such a special place. It’s designed to be inclusive of the 1-in-4 people amongst us who have physical / cognitive disabilities, autism, visual / hearing impairments, medically fragile, or are part of the aging population.

The Story

The founder Olenka Villarreal wanted a playground where her disabled and non-disabled daughters could play with their friends. They had very different needs and she found that the existing playgrounds didn’t cater to these needs well. She gathered a team of volunteers together, created the vision together, fundraised, and made this a reality over the course of 7 years. The playground opened up in 2015 in Palo Alto, CA as a socially inclusive playground, where all are welcome. Now it has over 25k visitors a month!! Wow!

Olenka and her friend Jill Asher went on to create the Magical Bridge foundation, and Santa Clara County has allocated $10M in funds for more playgrounds like this!

My Visit to the Playground

Here are some snapshots from my first visit to Magical Bridge Playground. Hint: If you go early in the morning, no one else is there and it’s having a whole playground to yourself!!

I love how colorful everything is and how many different play structures there are!

I had never seen these before!!

They have little descriptions on what the different play zones are, who it’s for, and the science behind them. Neat!

Community Stage

They have a bunch of different slides too. Slides are my favorite – so much fun to go down!

Omg the baby slide in the tot zone is too cute!!

Alright, that wraps up the photos that I took at the Magical Bridge Playground. All I can say is how impressed I am with this place. They put a lot of thought into making this a place for everyone. They collaborated with play experts, educators, therapists, families living with different disabilities, and landscape architects. They’re very conscious of the health and wellness benefits of play as well. It’s a magical place!

They also have other local authors and concerts this summer in the playground. Check out their Facebook page for the event line-up.

The success of this playground has led to even more of these Magical Bridge playgrounds being planned for around the Bay Area – with locations planned for Mountain View, Morgan Hill, Redwood City, and Sunnyvale.

But there is still a $1M funding shortfall to kick off construction of the Mountain View playground. So please consider donating to this nonprofit if you want to see this playground come to your city. I already made my contribution! You can donate here: http://magicalbridge.org/mtnview/

Storytime Event

Also, I’ll be doing a storytime for my book Use Your Voice at Magical Bridge Playground in Palo Alto on Sunday, June 2, 2019 from 3-5pm. Check out the Facebook events page for more details and to RSVP!

Thank you for reading! Hope you have a chance to check out this place and get to experience it for yourself! The pictures do it no justice.

Getting My Book into Bookstores

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From my recent social media posts, you may have noticed that my book has been accepted into a couple of bookstores! I’d like to share some insight about the process for those who may be curious.

Note: If your physical book is self-published by Amazon or CreateSpace, then some bookstores may not accept it for consideration. Instead, I self-published with IngramSpark.

Independent bookstores / gift shops each have their own process for acquiring new books. Across different cities in the Bay Area, I basically use my two legs and walk into these stores to try to pitch my book. I introduce myself and ask them if they would consider reviewing my book as a possible fit for their store.

Some stores have a policy that they don’t work with independent authors individually. I’ve gotten rejected quite a few times like this. One time, I walked into a bookstore just ONE hour after their staff decided to discontinue their local author program. I couldn’t believe the timing. Oh well.

No hard feelings though, it’s understandable. They have tried working with local authors in the past. The problem is the economics. These stores barely broke even by taking on books from local authors, so they just can’t make it work despite their best intentions. Instead, they work with big publishers that have a larger catalog of books.

If the store does agree to review the book, then you either leave them a copy or they review it on the spot. If they decide it’s a good fit (woohoo!), they will either purchase a couple of copies upfront at wholesale price or it’ll be a consignment agreement.

Consignment is when you provide them with the inventory of books (several copies) and they put it on their shelves. If a consumer buys the book, then you’ll get paid at some later pay cycle. If the books don’t sell through, then you don’t get paid. There may be a fee to cover the overhead of entering the book into their inventory system.

So the consignment program is how I got on to the shelves at Books Inc in Mountain View! The above image is the first 5 books I handed over to them. 🙂 It’s a 3 month trial basis, so we’ll see how the books do.

More details on the Books Inc Consignment Program here. The application form is online too. Each location of Books Inc in the Bay Area handles consignment differently though, so I’m going to try to pitch the other locations to see if they’ll carry it too.

Once your book is carried by the store, then you can also discuss with them the option to do a storytime or in-person event. Speaking of which, my storytime event just happened last Saturday, June 9, 2018 and I had a great time. Hooray!

Hope this was helpful, good luck!