A community arts and performance company based in South Yorkshire specialising in working with special needs adults and children.
FreeTime
Art & Crafts for Special Needs,
Disabled & Autistic Kids
The arts offer a huge range of ways for your child to express his or herself and boost their self-confidence. From arts residential weekends for children with cancer and their siblings, to multi-sensory theatre productions for children with multiple learning disabilities, you’ll find dozens of opportunities in these pages. So if you fancy giving a Rodin sculpture a hug, or dancing like a sugar plum fairy, this is the place to find out how. If you’re planning a day out, you’ll see that most of the big museums and art galleries have great interactive events for special needs kids either in family or schools groups. Have fun.
Here are a couple of great sites to get you started
The wonderfully complete Art Spider from Mencap has a great map with details of what’s on in your area. It’s highly interactive – you can even upload your own work and reviews.
Disability arts online
This is an enormous, and very up to date about arts events and organisations, especially for teenagers and adults.
Action for Children’s Arts
They do all kinds of events and activities to get children involved in the arts.
Here you’ll find lots of links to help you see, do and experience more art – from activity ideas you can do at home, to photography competitions – even paintings for the visually impaired that come to life when you touch them - check out Living Paintings.
Art Spider
Brilliant site from Mencap listings all kinds of arts opportunities for disabled people.
FIND OUT MORE
Art Through Touch
Promotes and provides access to art for visually impaired people. Activities include art talks and seminars, art workshops, visits to museums and galleries.
FIND OUT MORE
Artists Helping Children
Find online arts and crafts projects and activities for children, Preschoolers, Teens, and Toddlers
FIND OUT MORE
BlindArt is a charity whose aim is to encourage participation and interaction of the visually impaired in the sighted domain of the visual arts.
The BUILD Charity provides a wide range of opportunities ranging from youth clubs and youth activity schemes to a weekly social club (known as The Wednesday Club) as well as a range of community based activities with opportunities to take part in sport, gardening, outdoor and cultural activities as well as skills learning workshops.
Create
Create uses the power of the creative arts to transform the lives of society's most disadvantaged and vulnerable people.
FIND OUT MORE
Creative Abilities
Runs exciting dance/Drama and arts sessions for people with learning and or physical disabilities, both children and adults.
FIND OUT MORE
An innovative disability arts organisation based in the North West, formally known as NWDAF, it continues to be a cutting edge Disability and Deaf Arts Agency.
DASH believes that Disability does not mean Inability, please look at the link for this group to see a huge variety of activities, help, advice and the chance to be part of something new. From an inclusive and adaptable Sunday youth club to team sports to days out, swimming sessions, reading and writing skills classes, line dancing, boccia the list goes on and on.
Encouraging and helping people with disabilities to take up or continue photography. Site includes news, membership details and forum.
Eye Arts Club
The Arts Club organise arts projects for children on Saturday mornings in Eye, Suffolk. They welcome children aged 7 and up, especially those with additional needs - whether physical, learning, sensory or behavioural. They aim to provide an integrated, yet supported, setting for arts activities, social interaction and fun. Activities include movement, dance, visual arts, film, animation, puppetry and maskwork.
FIND OUT MORE
Little Mouth Forum
FIND OUT MORE
The Living Paintings free library supports blind and partially sighted adults, children and young people. The library service provides raised versions of pictures that come to life when fingers feel them. Sound recordings tell the pictures' stories while directing the fingertips across the tactile image, describing what is being touched, felt and 'seen'.
NottsInfoScript
Youth club activities
FIND OUT MORE
Services include daytime support services, support in the home and community, social enterprises, Domiciliary Services, supported living and a social club in the evening.
PASTEL
PASTEL provides a wide range of social, educational & learning, leisure & recreational opportunities. These meaningful activities offer new experiences to develop people's independence skills and group working. Projects have included: art, dance, drama, music, shadow puppetry, ball games and sports, food hygiene and preparation, film making, digital photography, ceramics and other fun indoor and outdoor activities.
FIND OUT MORE
Photographers with Disabilities
A group that aims to encourage participation in photography by people with disabilities of all ages. Includes competition details, events, a forum and details of their meetings in Bristol.
FIND OUT MORE
Arts centre with a disability-related focus who offer a range of accessible arts courses and events.
NCTD provides tactile diagrams, maps and pictures for blind and partially sighted people of all ages and all walks of life.
Sense is a national charity that supports and campaigns for children and adults who are Deafblind. They were established from a family support group in 1955 by parents whose children were born with rubella, and the experience, skills and views of families remain central to their work. You can see how they have developed over almost 60 years on their website.
Sense offers high-quality, flexible services across the UK, using skilled staff and a dedicated network of volunteers. They work with a wide range of Deafblind and multi-sensory impaired people, as well as those who have a single-sensory impairment with additional needs.
They work with children, young people, adults and older people with a progressive sight and hearing loss, offering a range of housing, educational and leisure opportunities. They also offer support to all Deafblind people in both the congenital and acquired Deafblind communities, not just those who receive direct support and services from them.
SHABANG. Creating arts projects for children with disabilities/additional needs.
Shape Arts
Shape develops opportunities for disabled artists; they train cultural institutions to be more open to disabled people, and they run participatory arts and development programmes.
FIND OUT MORE
Sue's Direct Payments
Arts and crafts group
FIND OUT MORE
The Total Arts creative learning group is for young people aged 11-19 with disabilities. They offer regular Saturday workshops featuring dance, drama, music making, film production and story devising leading to productions.
Arts projects in hospitals across the South West region, working with children with cancer & leukemia, their siblings & families, as well as developing work with children with other life threatening illnesses too. The residential weekends bring young people into fantastical worlds where anything is possible. Encouraging young people to collaborate to use their energy & imagination to help solve mysterious scenarios using a whole host of arts techniques ranging from drama & dance to printing making & pottery.
