Interplay Charity

Interplay is a local charity that supports children and young people with and without disabilities to access mainstream play and leisure opportunities.

Interplay is an organisation that believes that all young people have a right to play and leisure opportunities. Interplay aims to balance society’s inequality towards people because of their disability. Interplay provides integrated play and leisure opportunities for young people with disabilities in the City and County of Swansea and the County Borough of Neath Port Talbot. These opportunities take place within the local community so that the young people themselves benefit from accessing integrated activities. Interplay believe that by making friends with local young people the problems associated with being in special schools and being in a peer group with people that are living large distances apart can be remedied. The whole community also gains from the diversity of young people using the facilities. The integration and eventual inclusion into play and leisure can be both in existing activities and in some cases in activities initiated by Interplay and integrated from the start. By encouraging integrated and inclusive activities Interplay supports the eventual breaking down of stereotypes of people with disabilities.

Interplay was started as a summer play project under the NCH organisation. It involved a segregated provision becoming integrated by siblings, then friends and finally other local young people. The idea of moving young people with disabilities into their local playschemes was then acted on. A pattern of supporting integration by employing additional workers for the schemes was started. These workers were not employed as care workers for the children with special needs but as extra support workers to help the scheme integrate and accept all children. The core funding for Interplay was transferred to the joint management by West Glamorgan Council for Voluntary Services and West Glamorgan Play Association with CVS taking the main financial management and Play Association adding their expertise in the area of children’s play.

Interplay has been working in the Swansea and Neath Port Talbot areas for the last thirteen years. It is a registered charitable company with its own board of trustees and is linked into the voluntary and statutory sector through affiliation to the local Councils for Voluntary Service and various local networks such as The Children’s Partnership.

Interplay provides trained and experienced workers to support the process leading to inclusion of any young person referred. Referrals come to us from the statutory officers of Social and Education Services, through voluntary organisations and directly from parents, carers and the young people themselves. The majority of young people who use our service have profound learning disabilities; many have physical impairments, sensory impairments and challenging Behaviour. The main criterion is that without additional support, either short or long term, they would not be able to gain access to the play or leisure opportunities they wish to become involved in.

The work of Interplay goes on throughout the year but as most large scale play and leisure initiatives take place in the Easter and summer school holidays a large proportion of Interplay expenditure happens during those times.
Interplay does not only provide a service for children with special needs. It also aims to break down stereotypes and outdated attitudes and helps to develop the value system of the whole community. This occurs in a number of ways firstly by the direct exposure of local community projects to processes of inclusion, secondly by training of volunteers, Interplay workers and other sessional and full time play and leisure workers on aspects of disability equality.

You can email Interplay:

admin@interplay.org. uk