Face-to-Face Services
Our Meet ups for Members:
We run a variety of regular and one-off meet ups for members of our community. Our main regular meet ups currently take place in Bury, Greater Manchester, and Sheffield.
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In addition to our regular meet ups we also host several 'Big Weekend' meet ups for members from across the UK, including an annual one in London.
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All our meetups are facilitated by our neurodivergent staff team and designed with the needs of autistic young people in mind - joining in is always optional and taken at the young person's pace.
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Our young people decide on the types of meet ups that we run and the activities that we do together. Currently our regular meet ups include:
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Youth Club
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Football
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Forest School
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We have also done other activities such as NERF gun wars, trainspotting, GoApe and visiting the National Videogame Museum!
Our Big Weekend meet ups have included activities such as taking over an arcade, trampolining, cinema trips, TreeTop Nets, huge picnics in the park, crazy golf and more!
We have our own Forest School site in Bury, where we run monthly sessions for our members, facilitated by Forest School Leaders.
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​Here young people are free to toast marshmallows around the fire, build dens, hang out in our hammocks or join in with a game of 'Shrek Hide and Seek'!
In 2024 we opened our very own Community Centre in Bury town centre! This was a dream come true for us and means that we have been able to expand our face-to-face sessions and support for local young people.
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We currently host regular Youth Club sessions at our Centre, as well as our new Learning Community and various Workshops and training sessions for both young people and professionals. (More about those below!)
At our Centre we have a range of gaming consoles and PCs, a whole host of board games and sensory tools and equipment!
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We also have an awesome selection of neuroaffirming books for young people to read if they would like to.
Our Self-Directed Learning Community:
Our Centre in Bury is also home to our new Spectrum Gaming Learning Community (SGLC), which provides a place of emotional and sensory safety for local autistic young people aged 10-17 who are struggling to reclaim their natural desire to learn in a non-judgemental, non-coercive, democratic learning space.
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The SGLC staff team hold a unique combination of clinical and mentoring skills to support the young people attending the community. Many of our staff are autistic or otherwise neurodivergent, and have lived experience of barriers to learning.
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The SGLC is a completely different approach to learning based upon self-directed and democratic principles tailored to the needs of autistic young people.
The primary aim of the community is to create an environment of psychological, physical and sensory safety that enables autistic young people to feel able to regularly attend, contribute to, and participate in as an active, respected community member.
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All community members get to choose the activities they wish to be involved in. They choose how to spend community budgets and prioritise and plan for activities dependent upon the needs of the community.
SGLC is open to young people aged 10-17 who are members of Spectrum Gaming. You can find out more about our Learning Community in the guide linked below:
Autism Understood Live Sessions for Young People:
Based on the content we created for our Autism Understood website, we created a series of workshops that aims to support autistic young people to develop their understanding of autism and themselves. We ran a pilot of this in September 2024 and hope to be able to offer more of them again soon as the feedback from families and young people was overwhelmingly positive.
These sessions are for autistic young people aged 10-17 and comprise of six weekly face to face sessions at our centre in Bury. The sessions are facilitated by autistic adult SG staff members and aim to foster discussion about lived experience in a safe peer-support environment with a small group.
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We are also working on developing Train the Trainer resources for this project, so that other autistic professionals will be able to deliver the content to the young people that they work with too.
