By Gary Nager
Congratulations go out to former Rotary Club of New Tampa president and current assistant district governor for Area 1 of Rotary District 6890 Peter Gambacorta, past District 6890 governor Gary Gunter and their fellow New Tampa Rotary club members who brought in funds from 18 other Rotary Clubs (and other sources) and an estimated 315 volunteers from several organizations to build (in one five-hour day, on Sept. 26), a 6,300-sq.-ft., $100,000 wheelchair-accessible playground at Rotary’s Camp Florida in Brandon.
Camp Florida, which opened in June 1992, has a mission to, “provide special needs user groups with clean, safe, barrier-free camping facilities. Our vision is that we can provide the opportunity for all special needs people (children and adults) to experience the fun and enjoyment of camping.”
“Unfortunately, the playground at the camp had rotting wood and was falling apart,” Gambacorta says. “And, it wasn’t wheelchair-accessible anyway.”
An Idea Born In Costa Rica
Gambacorta says he first got the idea to build the playground at Camp Florida while he and a group of New Tampa Rotary and University of South Florida (USF) Rotaract Club members were on an international service trip to Costa Rica 18 months ago to build a playground in conjunction with the Rotary Club of Alajuela, Costa Rica.
“The playground we built there was basically an old construction dump site,” Gambacorta recalls. “It took 18 New Tampa Rotarians and USF Rotaract members all day just to clear the site of all of the debris. But, we turned it into a beautiful playground and the Rotary Club there has even improved it since we finished it. But, it made me think we could do something really special for Rotary’s Camp Florida.”
Gambacorta started his nest egg for the playground with a $3,500 donation from the Alajuela Rotary, which the Costa Rican club donated to their New Tampa brethren out of appreciation for building that playground in Central America.
“From there, we got $2,500 from the Rotary Club of Temple Terrace, $8,500 from District 6890 and a total of $25,000 in donations from 18 other Rotary Clubs,” Gambacorta says.
He adds, “We wrote the grant for matching funds from Rotary International, but the Trustees decided that too much money was going to playgrounds, so they decided ‘no more playgrounds’ while our grant was in process. We thought we weren’t going to be able to fund it.”
But, in March 2014, three months before Gunter became the District governor, “Gary said go ahead and do it,” Gambacorta remembers.
“Then, we met up with the people from KaBoom, the Washington, DC-based nonprofit that builds play places for kids across the country, and they put us in touch with the MetLife Foundation (located in the MetLife office complex in Highwoods Preserve, which sent a large number of volunteers to help build the playground), which helped us out even more financially.”
The Prep Work
Once the funding was in place, Gambacorta says the site, like the one in Costa Rica, had to be prepped. The Rotary Club of Lakeland South brought two Bobcat trucks to take down the old playground two weeks before the day of construction.
Then, four days before the sea of volunteers descended upon the camp, the Lakeland South Rotary again brought in heavy equipment to dig the holes to anchor the playground equipment, which had meticulously been measured by KaBoom contractor Gary Greene, who oversaw every aspect of the playground’s construction four days later.
And of course, Gambacorta did more than just lead the project. He also is the owner of The Private Chef of Tampa catering service, and he cooked (the day before) a unique, hearty breakfast for the volunteer playground “crew” featuring trays and trays of veggie stratas, noodle kugels and more for the 225 people he estimated would show up.
“KaBoom told us we needed 200 people, but I was amazed that we actually had 315 volunteers who made it into the camp to help us build,” Gambacorta recalled a few days later. “And I heard we had quite a few who got turned away because we ran out of parking spaces.”
Building The Playground
Gambacorta’s breakfast was over early enough that construction began by 9 a.m. Those 300+ volunteers — including large contingents from MetLife and the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office (including deputies, cadets and trainees), plus other Rotary Clubs and other organizations — were divided into teams, each handling specific tasks. There was a huge brigade whose job it was to haul 130 cubic yards (nearly 40 tons!) of mulch from where it was dumped at the camp to the playground, others mixed concrete, still others put together different pieces of the playground equipment or built benches or painted walkway pavers. Yours truly was so moved I helped some of my fellow Wesley Chapel Rotary Club members haul the painted pavers in a wheelbarrow to their destination at the front of the playground.
Lunch was served by volunteers for Faces of Courage, a nonprofit organization which puts on camps (for cancer-stricken children and adults) at Camp Florida. New Tampa resident and OB/Gyn Dr. Elliot Cazes and his buddy (and cancer survivor) Rick Miller regularly provide full-blown catering for the Faces of Courage camps, so Cazes says, pressing all those Cuban sandwiches and providing all the fixins’ for more than 300 people, in three lunch shifts, “was no big deal for us.”
When it was all over, less than five hours after the work began and the playground (which also is specially designed to serve autistic children), was completed and dedicated, Gambacorta expressed a sentiment echoed by many: “I just can’t stop smiling.”
For info, visit NewTampaRotary.org.
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