Читать книгу Why Play Works - Jill Vialet - Страница 14

It's true that a better understanding of the ideas behind play might have influenced our name change. For the first 13 years we were known as Sports4Kids. This name had seen us from almost the very beginning (we were briefly Kidsports until receiving a cease and desist order from another organization). It had accompanied us through significant growth in staff—including opening new offices in cities across the country, the development of our leagues, and our first big AmeriCorps grant. It was the name we were using when the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) decided to invest an astronomical $4.4 million in an initial plan to achieve national scale. And, perhaps most importantly, Sports4Kids was the name—with its accompanying logo—that was on literally thousands of t‐shirts that staff and students wore with a sense of pride and belonging.

Changing an organization's name is a surprisingly complicated undertaking. Not so much in the actual logistics of it—those are fairly straightforward. The complicated part comes in managing all the emotions associated with a name change. To our credit, we didn't take the emotional aspect of our name change lightly. The entire process took almost 18 months from the initial idea of looking at redesigning our logo through deciding to do a whole rebrand, to selecting the name and actually producing new t‐shirts. Looking back, it seems clear that one of the most important aspects of this shift was in developing our ability to explain why. Why Playworks? It was so important—especially for our staff—that the story wasn't simply why not Sports4Kids, even if the 4 in the middle did seem hopelessly 1980s in the rearview mirror. Our name change had to be about becoming something bigger.

With support from RWJF, we worked with a friend and board member, Dru DeSantis, and her firm DeSantis Breindel to go through a very professional process. The team interviewed stakeholders—students, principals, staff, and funders—about the nature of our programming and impact. They generated concepts, solicited suggestions, and made presentations. They brought in two industry superstars—women from Miami, referred to somewhat mysteriously as “the naming ladies,” who generated a list of over 500 names that I remember spending hours poring over.

There was a lot of creativity and a few false starts. We briefly fell in love with the name “Big Bounce,” until someone pointed out that our female staff members might not be super‐psyched to have that emblazoned on their chests. There was another name—that now escapes me—that I knew we absolutely had to have, but someone else owned it.

Playworks wasn't actually on the list. It emerged during a presentation to staff members when we were stalled and decided to go back to the drawing board and review what we knew. Dru was walking us through a slide deck—yet again—on all our various attributes and values, emphasizing what principals and teachers said about our impact over and over again. In summation she noted, “Play works.” Our then executive director David Rothenberg and then COO Elizabeth Cushing looked at each other, and we had found our new name.