AMI Community Grants application

Shannan from Shirley

Shirley Playcentre a provides a unique environment for children to learn alongside the teachers that know them best, their own parents, who stay and play on session. Parents are supported to attend free parenting, childhood development & early childhood education courses run by Playcentre Aotearoa.
We employ coordinators with higher levels of ECE training to support these parents in their roles as educators and to ensure we are able to provide a rich learning environment
for the children in our community. As many families at our centre do not have family support networks locally, our centre becomes their village.

Our current playground equipment is outdated, in need of maintenance to meet our health and safety and licencing requirements, they take up a large area which does not allow the space to be utilised to the best standard and is not suitable for the smaller members of our centre to use.

Shirley Playcentre have been working hard to fundraise to create a natural sensory path for our children to explore and would like to be able to purchase new playground equipment that would reflect the open-ended play that we are trying to achieve with our sensory path and pay to removed the older equipment that is concreted in. We would like Tredsafe boxes which can be used as hideaways, for jumping, climbing, balancing and have the versatility for us to regularly move around to create new environments, giving the children opportunities to test not only their physical abilities but also creativity, imagination and problem-solving skills. Child-led play is at the core of Playcentre philosophy and these offer the flexibility for the children to work together with other children and with the support of adults to reconfigure the equipment how they want. This flexibility also allows us to set it up in different configurations to suit all ranges of physical abilities of the children on session that day.

Feel free to call us 03-980 0576 or check out www.playcentre.org.nz... if you want to find out more how Playcentre operates as a non-profit whānau-run cooperative.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, we are very excited about the future for our outdoor space and we hope you vote for us. We have attached photos of our current playground and what we would like to get.