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Youth Farms and Activity Playgrounds  in Germany

Youth Farms and Activity Playgrounds are pedagogically-supervised playgrounds for all children of 6 -14 years. They are not connected with any schools and are simply concerned with leisure activities. Unlike most other European countries, schools in West Germany do not usually cover the pupils' whole day, but close around 1 - 2 pm.

Youth Farms and Activity Playgrounds offer their programmes in the afternoon between 1 - 6 pm during school terms, and during school holidays they cover the whole day. The farms and playgrounds are open all year, several days a week.

Visiting the playgrounds is free; children don't have to register and can decide for themselves when, how often and for how long they want to come. They also decide on their own activities and whether they want to make use of the opportunities offered by the organisers, or whether they want to do something of their own, singly or in groups.

Children form the bulk of visitors to Farms and Playgrounds.

Some of these projects use the opportunities of these non-institutional spaces for work with children with disabilities, physical or mental, and do therapeutic and integration work with disadvantaged as well as "normal" children. Some places have long experience with therapeutical riding, a form of therapy providing both psychological and physical strengthening in a wide variety of cases of children with a handicap. This is usually carried out in co-operation with schools or homes for the disabled.

The opportunities to offer an attractive playground programme are, of course, dependent on the size of the playground, the number of workers and the money available. These conditions vary widely, as the projects are mainly financed by the communities whose financial strength is variable. There are playgrounds with only minimal equipment and others with a good infrastructure. The following list illustrates the breadth of possibilities:

Financing playgrounds and supplying land and buildings falls to the communities and are set down in a Federal law, which says:

"The development of young people must be aided by the necessary offers of youth activities. These are to develop from the interests of young people and are also to be structured by those involved. They are to contribute to a self-determined existence and to encourage social responsibility and interest".

Such "offers of youth activities" are made by the Youth Farms and Activity Playgrounds. The financial and material aid provided by the communities does not mean that they must also organise them. At present more than half the playgrounds and farms are run by parents' initiatives, which are "eingetragene Vereine", legal entities, in themselves. They receive community aid and are responsible for the use of money and materials. The other playgrounds are run as community institutions.

Work on the Farms and Playgrounds follows these guiding principles:

Open to all visitors; free access; continuity; changeability; independence; maturity; integration; ecology; community development.

The playgrounds and farms are open to all children, regardless of their social, economic, physical or mental backgrounds. The work is open too, that is there is no fixed programme for building, physical games, riding or playing. All is offered free of conditions - no membership, for instance, is necessary. In order to be open for everybody, the playgrounds must offer free access for all visitors. Besides openness and free access, the principle of continuity is considered a basic requirement for this kind of work, for only by being open all the year round and on several days a week can the playgrounds become an all-embracing space for living, playing, learning and free experience to the young visitors. A space that doesn't offer the opportunity, especially for younger people, of changing the surroundings themselves has lost the important quality of living space, and therefore also a large part of its possibilities for learning, playing, living and experience. The playground must remain changeable and must not be a ready-made space designed by adults.

The playground with all its varied activities and its educating design, aims to further the independence of the children and young people. It does not offer itself as an object simply to be used, but provokes and encourages creative activity. This implies the essential maturity of children and tries to develop and secure it.

Another important guiding principle is that of integration. It is a fact that during the last 150 years our society has been organised to offer more and more specialised centres to smaller and smaller groups. This is to be avoided on the Youth Farms and Adventure Playgrounds. They offer themselves to sick and healthy people, to Germans and foreigners, children and adults - to the most divergent groups, in short, which may find there space for various encounters and experiences.

From the beginning the playgrounds and youth farms have included an attempt to develop an awareness of ecological development and the concept of healthy humans in a healthy environment. This is a central concern of this kind of work and includes a more intense experience of the changing seasons - of birth and death, of the process that changes dung to fertile earth and the problems of rubbish recycling.

Pedagogical-supervised playgrounds have been founded in order to improve the conditions of children's life and play. This aim is served by the various opportunities of the Youth Farms and Playgrounds and by personal relationships between the organisers and the children, as well as between the children themselves. On the other hand, the children's situation is governed by their living in a specific part of a town or suburb. It is important to try to influence the conditions of life in this part of town, to work for a better life together. Community orientation means on the one hand that the organisers of these playgrounds try to make their presence felt in the community through various projects and ideas, and on the other hand the playground offers opportunities for citizens' initiatives and for collaboration. Projects concerning traffic control, ecology, city planning, adult education etc. may be initiated.

The Federation of Jugendfarmen & Aktivspielplatze:

At the end of the 60s the first Youth Farm was opened in Stuttgart, and in the Markishes Viertel, Berlin, the first Abenteuerspielplatz was started. Soon parents and citizens initiatives, as well as cities and towns, began to found such playgrounds for their children. This was a new development although in Denmark, Norway and England the need to provide special spaces for children had been realised much earlier. There were new developments regarding the conditions necessary for the creation of both Youth Farms and Adventure Playgrounds, as well as their running, and the demands made on the workers in these new playgrounds.

This is the background to the founding of the Federation of Jugendfarmen & Aktivspielplatze eintragener Verein (corporation) in 1972 in Stuttgart. Then, as now, support for new foundations, advice and various forms of practical help, education and exchange of employees, collecting and processing information, have been among the important tasks of the Federation. In addition one had to explain the work of the Farms and Playgrounds to specialists as well as to the general public. This is still a basic concern of the Federation. Once the Federation was recognised all over the Federal Republic in 1979, these tasks have been done even more effectively, and they have also become more extensive. International co-operation and exchange have been intensified in recent years, as has support for the further development of the principles of this vast area within the "Open Work" with children and young people.

Following the reunification of Germany in 1990 it is important to get the idea of democratic playground work (which measures itself against the needs and wishes of the children themselves) across in the former DDR. Several parents' and citizens' initiatives already exist which work at building playgrounds and, generally, a social infrastructure. It will be important in the future to support these groups.

Information:

Brochures on specific problems and opportunities for work on Farms and Playgrounds (still available): Dying Wool and Making felt; Outside Games; The Natural Therapy of the Horse; Building Simple Solar Collectors; Work with Clay/Building a Simple Kiln; Working with Horses according to Tellington-Jones; Games; How to make boomerang and use it; How to built a canoe; How to make juggle-equipment and how to use it;and some more...You can order it online in german language. Also the general concept of Jugendfarmen & Aktivspielplatze. Jugendfarmen & Aktivspielplatze (brochure), the magazin "Offene Spielraueme" and several books etc (most in german language).

If you are interested to work in a project or you are able to offer a job in your project, please see our page Stellenmarkt

If you are interested in books please see following webpage

Address:

Bund der Jugendfarmen und Aktivspielplätze e.V.,
Haldenwies 14,
D - 70567 Stuttgart

phone: +49-711-6872302
fax: +49-711-6788569

contact: Hans Joerg Lange

Send E-Mail with questions or comments to the web-site to: hjl@bdja.org
Copyright © 2000 Bund der Jugendfarmen und Aktivspielplätze e.V.
last update: 15.04.04