It’s mid-summer and many people are out enjoying the season’s greatest pastime — swimming — at South Florida pools, lakes and endless miles of beaches.
But many people, and especially children, still do not know how to swim. In an effort to make learn-to-swim lessons easily available to all children, the Parks Foundation of Miami-Dade and the Swim for Jenny Memorial Fund will host iSwim for Jenny, Aug. 13-18, at participating Miami-Dade Parks’ and community pools.
iSwim for Jenny is a week-long endurance event where swimmers of all levels and abilities swim a cumulative number of laps of a pool and receive donations for their achievements. Moneys raised during iSwim for Jenny will benefit the Swim for Jenny Memorial Fund for water safety information and learn-toswim scholarships for underserved children in South Florida.
Swimming must be done at your neighborhood lifeguard community pool and/or one of the area’s Miami-Dade Parks aquatic facilities/donation collection sites, listed below:
AD Barnes Pool, 3401 SW 72 Ave., 305-665-1626;
South Dade Pool (Helen Sands), 16350 SW 280 St., 305-248-1386, and
Tamiami Pool, 11201 SW 24 St., 786- 315-5295.
To register your swim team at a different pool than those listed, or to register your community pool as an official site for the iSwim for Jenny, contact Jim O’Connor at A.D. Barnes Pool at 305-665-1626. All donations must still be turned in at one of the approved Miami-Dade Parks’ aquatic facilities/donation collection sites listed above on Aug. 18 between 1 and 4 p.m.
The Swim for Jenny Memorial Fund was created in honor of Jenny Hong Nguyen, a 12-year-old South Florida girl who suffered a drowning accident on April 16, 2011 after she went into water too deep for her limited swimming ability.
Many children do not know how to swim or know how to stay safe in or around bodies of water. The Parks Foundation of Miami-Dade established the Swim for Jenny Memorial Fund so that as many children as possible will have the opportunity to attend beginner learn-toswim lessons, no matter what their families’ income may be.
Nationally, drowning is the second-leading cause of injury-related death among children ages 1-14. Florida has the secondhighest number of drowning incidents in the U.S. and Miami-Dade County leads the state in drowning deaths with an average of 45 a year.
For more information on how you can register as an iSwim participant, to download a pledge form, for rules and regulations, or to make a donation, visit www.swimforjenny.org
