A brand new CIC with decades of experience

It was back in 2015 when play projects in Sheffield first really got their heads together to look at how to weather the storm of cuts and austerity measures to make sure that quality play offers for children weren’t lost – creating Sheffield Play Association.

In 2022, Manor After School and Kids Klubs (MASKK), Pitsmoor Adventure Playground and Sharrow Community Forum refreshed their commitment to play across the city by relaunching their shared efforts as Sheffield Play Partnership and setting out on a much more outward looking mission.

With support from Sheffield Council over the last couple of years, the Play Partnership has harnessed the knowledge and expertise of the existing play projects to help build capacity and momentum towards Sheffield becoming a really inspiring place to grow up – for all our children. In that time we’ve gathered and strengthened a city-wide network of people supporting play, run free training opportunities for the children’s workforce, helped hyper local play projects onto their feet, launched Sheffield Week of Play in October half term, held The Inaugural Sheffield Play Conference, built links with allies across the region, supported Sheffield Council’s new Play Streets pilot, ran Playing Out sessions over the Summer and won the Move More Change Maker Award! – We’re just working on our impact report for the year just gone so keep an eye out for that for more details of what we’ve been up to and the mission ahead.

We’ve done all of that before Sheffield Play Partnership is officially ‘a thing’ by working under one of the original organisations!

We’ve been able to build our capacity to the point that we hope to be able to bring more money and opportunities into the play sector, into Sheffield and for the benefit if the city’s children and young people so we have become a CIC.

We are really looking forward to the opportunities this will open up – we can’t wait to bring you along for the ride.

At the moment we are working to make sure all the necessary things are in place for Sheffield Play Partnership CIC to flourish. This move will likely mean that the way we work will change. Thanks for your patience and we look forward to seeing what we can do to support Sheffield’s awesome play, children and young people’s sector and the city’s young people themselves.