The YMCA/Detroit Leadership Academy received a brand new playground today thanks to the effort of more than 200 volunteers from Foresters(TM), the YMCA of Metropolitan Detroit and non-profit KaBOOM! The new playground will serve 7,500 children and their families in the Detroit community for years to come.

“Foresters is more than a life insurance provider,” said Kasia Czarski, Chief Membership and Marketing Officer at Foresters. “Foresters also invests in its members and in communities where they live, such as Detroit. Foresters believes in creating opportunities for families to spend healthy time together, like the Detroit Leadership Academy playground we all built here together.”

Foresters, a life insurance provider committed to the well-being of families, is funding 20 playground builds across North America in 2010. By investing $1.5 million in these projects, Foresters is partnering with KaBOOM! to build playgrounds that will eventually serve more than 250,000 children and their families.

The playground at Detroit Leadership Academy will provide 7,500 children and their families in the community with a great place to play. In less than eight hours, the child-designed playground was built from scratch by hundreds of volunteers from Foresters, the YMCA of Metropolitan Detroit and the surrounding community. The Academy will open in the fall of 2010 with an enrollment of approximately 325 children who would not have had a playground if not for the project. In addition, children and families spent the day playing games and participating in arts and crafts activities. Playgrounds are an ideal place for families to get to know other families and build strong communities.

“We are very excited to partner with Foresters and KaBOOM! to bring the children of Detroit a safe place to play and grow before and after school,” said Shawn Hill, Founding Principal and Superintendent of the Detroit Leadership Academy.

Thanks to the work of Foresters, the YMCA of Metropolitan Detroit and KaBOOM!, children and their families now have a 2,500 square-foot playground to call home that includes features such as an Adventure Bridge, Inclined Cliff Hanger, and Rockblocks Climber.

Six countries, five states, and many local jurisdictions have banned smoking in cars when children are present to protect them from the clearly established dangers of tobacco smoking pollution, and an estimated sixteen states are now debating similar restrictions, says public interest law professor John Banzhaf, Executive Director of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), America’s first antismoking organization, who just finished a heated debate on this topic on Fox News. http://video.foxnews.com/v/4305659/government-control-or …

In preparation for the debate he posted on his website [http://ash.org/] a brief video showing just how dangerous tobacco smoke in the car can be. It shows that, within a few seconds of lighting only one cigarette, the level of particulate pollution goes from the EPA’s SAFE level to a level the agency regards as HAZARDOUS. Indeed, in a few more seconds, the level of pollution is at least ten times higher than the level the EPA considers HAZARDOUS to all, not just to the elderly, children, or those who might have conditions making them especially susceptible. http://ash.org/carsmoking

His website also shows that the federal government has reported that secondhand tobacco smoke kills tens of thousands of Americans each year, that a leading medical journal has reported that parental smoking kills thousands of children annually, and that many studies – including the dramatic video – have shown that the pollution level from smoking in a car is UNHEALTHY even with all the windows rolled down. Rolling all the windows down, however, isn’t healthy for the children inside when its very cold, very hot, or raining, notes Banzhaf, and it is not reasonable to expect drivers to roll all the windows down in these conditions. In sharp contrast, asking them to refrain from smoking during the very brief period of most drives with children seems very reasonable.

Banzhaf noted that laws already require parents to protect their children by buckling them into expensive safety seats, locating them only on the rear seat, refraining from watching TV or having an open bottle of liquor in the car, and other requirements far more bothersome that simply not smoking. He also notes that we have accepted laws which require adults to buckle up – a requirement which is even more intrusive, especially since it aimed at protecting adults from their own carelessness rather than protecting children.

We ban smoking in bars so that adults will not be exposed even to a whiff of smoke, but we provide no protection whatsoever for millions of children who are daily strapped into rolling smokehouses, argues Banzhaf. That’s exactly backwards because children are for more vulnerable to tobacco smoke pollution and, unlike adults who can avoid bars or leave if they are bothered by the smoke, children have no choice but to suffer, and no one will heed their cries.

Banzhaf’s organization has helped many nonsmoking parents obtain court order against smoking around their children, and more recently helped persuade more than a dozen states to ban smoking in cars when foster children are present. This helped lead to the breakthrough where more and more states are likely to ban smoking to protect children in cars.