What is Swings Tampa Bay?
Swings Tampa Bay is a spontaneous community building organization! We hang hand-made hand-painted Swings all over Tampa Bay on trees, random structures, inside buildings, off of bridges…anywhere and everywhere, really. Our favorite so far? Inside the pedestrian overpass on I-275. We don’t get permission for all of them and we never really have an exact location picked out. We just find a fun place that speaks to us and go for it!
Why Swings?
A Swing becomes much more than a playful pastime as it instantly sparks curiosity, refreshes our community’s perception of our environment and encourages immediate interaction with people we may have otherwise walked right past. Swings provide opportunities to share stories, ideas, and a set of arms to push each other!
Vision Statement
Cultivating a tightly knit community based on love and respect indefinitely results in happier people, more opportunities to support and challenge each other, and the community solving problems more efficiently. A community focused on pushing past personal comfort zones in favor of meeting new people is a community with a strong future in deep relationships, connections, and engagement. Tampa Bay can be that community. We will continue to grow stronger as we encourage each other to spontaneously step out of our daily routine and adapt to a constantly changing environment.
Mission Statement
Get people together, together.
History
What began as a successful environmental design project quickly turned into Reuben and Hunter hanging classic red Swings all over downtown St. Petersburg. They began to notice the simple power a random Swing had on our community: people that would have never even acknowledged each other were immediately magnetized to their new discovery and began sharing warm conversation and new experiences while pushing each other high up into the air.
They applied for the 10/100/1000 awards by Creative Tampa Bay and Creative Loafing, and won first place and $1000 for ‘the best idea to better the Tampa Bay Community’. They hosted their first “Let’s Paint Swings” event at the Saturday Morning Market and gave the opportunity for anyone to hand paint a swing to be hung or hang themselves. Over 100 Swings were painted that first day. They knew this was something Tampa Bay wanted and continued to spread the love.
As of August 2011, we’ve hung almost 50 Swings and have had over 400 painted by Tampa Bay at the last five “Let’s Paint Swings” events. 400!
Currently
We’ve hung Swings in multiple cities in the Tampa Bay Area and are always looking for exciting (spontaneous!) new locations. We’re always preparing for the many “Let’s Paint Swings” events planned for the future.
We are also in the process of officially registering as a 501(c)(3), working with the City of St. Petersburg to figure out more possibilities, and developing many more spontaneous community building projects to get people together, together! We’re always partnering with other non-profits to more fully realize each other’s missions by hosting “Let’s Paint Swings” events and donating professionally painted Swings for auction.
For the Future
We have plans to help other communities start the same thing we have here, and have already started with a few! We don’t plan on stopping hanging Swings anytime soon and will definitely be throwing out other spontaneous community building installations in the near future. Once we have our official 501(c)(3) status, we plan to apply for grants to start on bigger projects to help bring people in the Tampa Bay Community. Our ideas constantly change and grow, and we never know exactly where we are going.
We are always open to new ideas, and love any kind of help you would like to give!
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