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Our Story
The Nature Play Solutions team is multidisciplinary and diverse, yet united by a strong commitment to make quality play an integral part of children's lives.
"Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning.
But for children play is serious learning.
Play is really the work of childhood."
Fred Rogers (American Educator)
Where We Started
Nature Play Solutions was founded by Chris & Emma Lawrence in 2011 with plenty of enthusiasm and even more ignorance about how the company would evolve...
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Chris & Emma both have fantastic recollections of their childhoods – many hours were spent playing in natural environments and now both are conscious that the world they experienced as children is not as readily available to their own children.
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Living in the suburbs of Perth, and when the children were young, Chris & Emma bought a block of land in the country (a place in Western Australia called Moodiarrup) where the kids
could have a bit of freedom away from the restraints of the city and a place to create many happy childhood memories.
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Chris & Emma have both been active in their children’s schools and have learnt first hand about the effort involved in implementing nature-based play. It was this experience that put them on the path to find ways to help others provide children with great play opportunities.
Our Team
While Chris & Emma founded the company, two of the first people to come on board were Kerry Logan, who was working for Kidsafe in their Playground Advisory Service and Wendy Seymour, who was a Landscape Architect working with the City of Swan. At the time of joining the company both Kerry & Wendy were at the forefront of advocating for quality play and were actively involved in the International Play Association.
As a Landscape Architect, Wendy specialised in play space design and, in particular, in providing play opportunities for everyone - irrespective of ability. Wendy passed away in 2016 and we are grateful that her play space design DNA underpins our work at Nature Play Solutions.
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While the company started by designing and building nature-based play spaces, from the very early days Emma, guided by her thinking as an occupational therapist, would regularly point out that the physical environment (ie a play space) was only a part of the equation and that the non-physical environment (ie school rules, risk aversion, cultural considerations, etc) was also important in how well organisations could provide children with quality play opportunities.
While our play space projects remain integral to what we do, we have also developed a range of services, such as our incursions, professional development sessions, play audits, etc to help support various aspects of play.
Nature Play Solutions has always been really fortunate to work with talented, knowledgeable and enthusiastic professionals. Our people are a truly integrative team who bring experience in landscape design, occupational therapy, education, child development, horticulture, public art, playwork, skilled tradies and parenting to our projects and services.
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The Our Team page provides bios for you to gain more insight about some of the people behind Nature Play Solutions.
