The business of playing for neurodiverse kids

RNZ News

6 days ago

Mac and Maria Pouniu, the owners and founders of Spectroom
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Mac and Maria Pouniu couldn't take their autistic son Mattias to a playground without feeling overwhelmed and judged by onlookers.
Instead of staying at home, isolated and alone, the couple decided to take a negative experience and turn it into something positive - a play centre for kids like their son.
About five years later, standing amidst the delightful chaos of a busy Wednesday morning, Poinui tells The Detail that Spectroom is more than just a play zone. It's a safe space where children with different disabilities - not just autism - can be themselves in an environment designed to let them play freely.
"A lot of our kids have grown up in that environment where they have very limited access to resources and they have very restricted access to things.
"Parents have become so used to, 'oh nah we've never done that, oh nah we're not going to do that'," Mac says.
But when parents come into an environment where their child can explore and they can take a step back, they see a whole different child.
"It's because we've never put them in a space where they can actually be themselves without restrictions," he says.
The diagnosis of Mattias led Maria Pounui to leave her job in marketing, retrain and work for Autism New Zealand as a play coach.
She's the other half of the driving force behind Spectroom. Her long term goal is to build a facility with wrap-around services for neurodivergent people of all ages, from day care for the little ones, to mock apartments for adults to practice everyday tasks.
"We started with our little ones because that's all the funding that I had... but the goal is at the end to have these services where we can assist and support our community when they are adults," she says.
Maria Pounui says while there are existing services already helping people with disabilities there simply aren't enough to serve all neurodiverse people.
"We need to have services that are umbrella services... because transitions for our kids with disabilities are really hard," she says.
Spectroom received global recognition within a year of opening, with FIFA asking Mac and Maria to build a similar sensory space at their centre at Eden Park.
"It's a quiet, dim space for our kids, also for adults, for them to go when they get overwhelmed.
"Especially for example at Eden Park when people get overwhelmed with crowd, crowded spaces, it could be anything, lighting, sound, and that triggers some people... and then sometimes they need a space to go into to recharge, recoup," Mac says.
The sensory room was only meant to stay for the duration of the 2023 FIFA Womens World Cup but it was so popular that Eden Park asked for it to stay permanently. Now it's been expanded and Mac says they're working on a similar facility in Manukau, where he says the need is highest.
"The original plan was to set one here (in Auckland), one in Wellington and one in Christchurch, that is still in the pipeline. But we have also recently become a trust.
"Becoming a trust is not as straight forward as becoming a trust and then get funding, you still have to go through the whole process of proving who we are, why we need the funding and then we need to target our right audience.
"It's really important that we get it right from the beginning, but we do plan to set more [facilities] around the country."
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