When Lisa DeShano of Iowa City was growing up in a Detroit suburb in the late 1980s, her elementary school playground was a bare, flat section of asphalt and nothing else – no swings or slides and not even a merry-go-round.
Frustrated, she went to her school principal and asked for a real playground. The principal’s solution was to give her a soccer ball.
She went back later and asked again.
“She said it was too dangerous for boys and girls to play together,” DeShano said, “So she gave the girls jump ropes and put up a basketball hoop for the boys.”
That frustration may have lit a spark.
After earning her degree in architecture from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, DeShano worked in the architecture corporate world for awhile, then landed what you might say was her dream job.
DeShano ended up designing and executing large-scale playground projects for kids in all regions of the U.S., plus other countries such as Australia, India, Afghanistan, and Congo.
“It’s a part of my soul,” she told me. “Sometimes I think I am the luckiest person to work with the most generous people in the world, volunteers and kids.”