Play For All
Wolves Play Café is an organisation whose mission is to work in partnership to make Wolverhampton a fun, safe and supportive city for all children to grow up in.
We recognise that some people are particularly likely to experience discrimination and harassment are committed to making sure all activities are as inclusive and welcoming as possible.
We aim to design our activities, services and decision-making processes to encourage and support participation from people who face disadvantage in society, including women, people from diverse ethnicities, disabled people, LGBTQ people, and people on low incomes.
What does Play for All mean to us at Wolves Play Cafe?
Play for All means we believe there should be equitable access to high-quality early years play across Wolverhampton. Some of the ways we deliver this are below and found in our Access and Inclusion Policy. Further ways we have developed our Play for All approach include:
– attending regular networking events such as SEN Events organised by City of Wolverhampton Council to develop new partnerships and maintain connections with Local Authority and other community groups
– piloting a Play for All SEN session through 2024 ‘Relaxed Nature Play’
– piloting ‘Super Saturdays’ – nature play for male caregivers through 2024 and embedding this into the weekly programme from 2025
– creating Play Tester Teams and inviting Play Friends to be part of our Project Boards and projects such as ‘Our Shared Story’ in 2025, developing the first Wolves Play Cafe picture book
– improving our accessibility resources including creating bespoke visual signs to support young children within sessions
– developing Social Stories for each site, starting with Gatis in 2024
– developing translated and pictoral Charters
Resources
You can see more about what our sessions by watching this short trailer on Youtube
Our Aims
ONE
To facilitate varied, open-ended and carefully scaffolded play opportunities to support development and independence of children under 7 and primarily those under 5, in our city.
TWO
To create a caring and cohesive community in our hometown – helping reduce feelings of isolation of caregivers of young children by providing safe, friendly, welcoming and diverse opportunities to enable valuable stories to be shared.
THREE
To empower caregivers of young children to support their knowledge of children’s development to help create lifelong impacts for little ones’ lives in our city.
Accessibility
All of our events are held in venues that are accessible to wheelchair users and pushchairs. Where possible we also offer different forms of communication including pictorial, written and verbal to cater for different accessibility needs. We will reflect this policy at our sessions and provide a space for attendees to share their thoughts and ideas for improvements, or signpost to other services that their peers may enjoy and benefit from.
Our communications to our audiences will be considered and directed through various medias for accessibility including; posters, social media, email, phone calls, website. Where we produce marketing material, we will always consider language used, fonts and colours, alignment and size of fonts to encourage access for all.
When we organise activities we consider location and transport links, including parking spaces, road links, bus stop and train stations. We also consider times and days of the week best suited for audiences and factor in time in sessions for latecomers, understanding the nature of having little ones means timings do not always go to plan.
Although some of the led activities we deliver are charged, we work where possible to provide Pay As You Feel and subsidised play opportunities We also ensure that there is a discretionary booking and donation process for Pay As You Feel sessions, believing no one should face discrimination to participate in our play sessions.
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Diversity
We aim to organise a range of activities to suit the interests and meet the needs of a wide variety of people and deliver these in spaces across the city, and refrain from delivering sessions where possible in institutionalised settings such as religious settings.
Wolves Play Café should always be open to new ideas, and particularly prioritise opportunities for residents to share their cultural heritage with one another to reflect the great diversity and richness of this in Wolverhampton.
Inclusion
Every participant and customer of Wolves Play Cafe should be made to feel equally welcome and included at all activities and events and should be aware of how to make it known if this is not the case. Wolves Play Café will support people who feel they have been harassed or discriminated against and will not victimise or treat them less well because they have raised this.
Sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic or otherwise offensive and inflammatory remarks and behaviour are not acceptable by anyone. These constitute harassment and will be dealt with as per as our Anti-Bullying Policy.
Next steps
We are continually looking at ways we can improve our access and inclusion approaches and create a fun and friendly space for under 7s and their caregivers to enjoy in Wolverhampton.
Contact us to discuss further opportunities to work together at info@wolvesplaycafe.org.
Wolves Play Cafe is so grateful of our funders and partners who are also passionate about Play for All
WITH THANKS TO
King Charles III Charitable Fund
for supporting access and inclusion improvements from 2023-2025
Wolves Play Cafe is a not-for-profit organisation, all funds are invested into supporting young children and their caregivers in our city.
