“Public participation takes many forms.Countless islanders get involved as the parents of youngsters, helping out in our schools or coaching athletic programs. Others volunteer with the elderly or infirm, pick up garbage at roadsides, run for office or just work behind the scenes to change the community for the better. We thank them.Others find their calling in sitting back and complaining about traffic revisions – but this isn’t about them.Instead, it’s about those who make the occasional exemplary effort, and we paid homage to some of them – and their success – this past weekend and here again today.We would cite as one example the new KidsUp! playground at Battle Point Park, the Sunday dedication of which drew – quite literally – countless youngsters to explore its fort-like maze of corridors, rooms and secrets.A group of parents saw an opportunity to do something positive for the community around them – replacing a functional but somewhat pedestrian play area at the island’s marquee spot for active recreation – and embarked on an impressive fund-raising drive. Organizing the dawn-to-dusk construction period last week was even more amazing.When’s the last time you tried to raise $100,000 or more in private donations for a project, and then got 1,000 people to turn out over four days to help put it together? Hats off to the KidsUp! folks pulling off something quite unique.We’ll save special plaudits, though, for Ed Kushner, Wendy Johnson, Norm Down and Kate Carruthers, and the many others responsible for the new Marge Williams Center on Winslow Way.In Saturday’s Review, we chronicled the two-and-a-half-year-long process by which the building across from Winslow Green was transformed from a crime scene, a grim reminder of a friend and neighbor lost, to a new symbol of faith and vision and can-do volunteerism.If you weren’t at Saturday’s dedication ceremonies, you missed one of the island’s more profound moments of reflection – a little bit of mourning, but much more celebration. Make it a point to stop by this week and meet the new tenants, non-profit and service agencies all, and admire the building. Find out what all that hard work accomplished. In both projects, we find common threads. Your neighbors built up the community not by sitting back and sniping at the ideas and work of others, but by coming up with plans of their own and seeing them through. They built up the community not by talking, but by doing; in need, they saw opportunity, and they got out of their homes got to work.Saturday, Mayor Dwight Sutton was right on the mark when he called the completion of the Marge Williams Center one of the Bainbridge Island community’s finest hours. We are all the richer for both projects, and we suspect Marge would be proud. “