Jays Care Foundation partners to create first fully-accessible baseball diamond in Western Canada

Jays Care Foundation, in partnership with Variety – The Children’s Charity and the Vancouver Canadians Baseball Foundation, opened the first fully-accessible baseball diamond in Western Canada this past week.

This project was the recipient of a $100,000 Field Of Dreams grant from Jays Care Foundation in 2015.  Field Of Dreams is Jays Care’s infrastructure granting program, which awards funds to groups across Canada to build, enhance or refurbish safe spaces for children and youth to play baseball, develop life-skills and learn from positive role models.

The project included an overhaul of the baseball diamond in Hillcrest Park, Vancouver, to create a facility safe for use by children with physical and cognitive disabilities.

Representatives from all funding partners opened the field with the help of local Challenger Baseball participants; an adaptive baseball program for children and youth with physical and/or cognitive disabilities.

In January of 2017, Jays Care Foundation assumed leadership of Challenger Baseball programming in Canada in partnership with Little League Canada and Baseball Canada. Since then, Jays Care has provided robust training to more than 150 Challenger coaches across the country and will invest $250,000 in Challenger Baseball programming across Canada in 2017. Challenger Baseball has more than 1,400 participants in 72 leagues across the country.

Through the Field of Dreams program, Jays Care has invested almost $10,000,000 in 80 infrastructure projects across Canada, including accessible baseball diamonds in Ottawa, ON and Moncton, NB.

For more on what the Jays Care is up to, check out their site.

Check out our Community and Environmental Impact page for other community initiatives going on around Rogers.