By Zan

This year has been a tough one for Pop-Ups Morgan and me. We had set out to get our heads down and into our playwork PhDs but unexpected things happened and we both had to turn our focus onto our families. Nonetheless, we still have many things to celebrate this year.  It’s amazing what change can be effected from the confines of your laptop!

10,000 Facebook likes – the traffic on our Facebook page has increased dramatically over the last few months, and the number of likes managed to double in a year! We are a little humbled by this following and want to thank you all for continuing to support our work.

2,000 Twitter followers – although it’s not nearly as large a following as our facebook crowd, we are still really pleased and excited to have amassed a lovely group of supports on our Twitter. Thank you to those in the twittersphere!

200+ pop-up adventure playgrounds – we have been supporting independent organisers to host their own pop-up adventure playgrounds in 18 different countries. Together with the ones that we have helped to host, there have been at least 200 locations where we have popped up. This is super exciting for us – if you want to host one too, register here.

100% new Loose Parts Manual – we worked with Playground Ideas to produce The Loose Parts Manual which has been downloaded a gazillion times already. It’s so very exciting to have such a reach and we are so very pleased to have had the opportunity to get all this playful information out there.

50% increase in staff – Morgan and I are so very pleased to be joined by Andy, officially making us an amazing little playwork crowd of three. In the short 3 months he’s been with us, he’s already finished his first project and we have loads more adventures planned for the future.

8 new guest written blogposts – we’re so pleased to have 8 of our independent organisers write about their first pop-up. If you want to check them out, we have collected all our guest blog posts for you to enjoy.

1 new addition to our board of directors – our behind-the-scenes support team has had a little change and now Ricky Tsang and Michelle Jones is joined by Amanda Richardson. We are super excited to have this small group of people around us and look forward to another fabulous Pop-Up year.

Thank you for an amazing pop up year -on to 2017
As the year draws to a close we reflect on another fantastic Pop-Up year. It wasn’t quite so travel-filled as 2015, but it has been adventurous nonetheless. We want to thank everyone for their support and hope that you have a 2017 that’s filled with your own amazing adventures and self-directed play!
Follow our adventures on Facebook and Twitter, or just keep checking back to this blog and our website www.popupadventureplay.org.