Today’s guest post is by Caitlin from Scholastic Media. She’s here to announce the winners from this year’s “2011 Clifford the Big Red Dog BE BIG In Your Community Contest!”   If you want to learn more about BE BIG or see how past winners have made a difference in their communities, check out some of our previous blog posts.

This year, the Be Big In Your Community contest had more than 1,000 BIG entries from more than 21,000 kids, parents, teachers and community leaders across the country. These great ideas ranged from helping homeless children celebrate their birthdays, creating handicap-friendly parks, to building a rooftop playground for a school with no outside play areas and many more!

The grand prize BIG Idea was to build a “Rooftop Playground” for kids at a school with no outside play area and came from Andrea de Avila and her team, from Oak Park, Illinois. Their BIG idea involved transforming a window-level rooftop into an eco-friendly, garden playground for students. This idea was so BIG and impressed the judges so much that it was awarded the grand prize so that Andrea and her team could make the idea into a reality. Now the team will work with Chicago Cares, an affiliate of the HandsOn Network, Scholastic’s BE BIG partner, to build her students an eco-friendly outdoor playground where they can learn AND play!

A first prize winning BIG idea came from Brittany Bergquist and her brother, both from Norwell, Massachusetts. They will be working to help homeless veterans by giving them prepaid cell phones that can be used to make doctors appointments, keep in touch with support circles of family and friends and find jobs.

Another winning BIG Idea came from 15-year-old Nimansha, from Nebraska. Nimansha will instill a “Grandfather Youth Task Force” with a local nonprofit organization to increase interaction between seniors and youth in her community, bridging gaps between generations and building relationships. Her BIG Idea will be helping people of all ages!

You can learn more about all of the BIG Ideas that won this year and how you can BE BIG like Clifford every day by visiting the Clifford Be Big site!