Are you familiar with sensory bags?
Typically, they’re a bag with fidgets and other sensory tools meant to help autistic kids (and others) who find very intense situations overwhelming. People who struggle with crowds, noise, or lighting can find the tools in the bag helpful in coping. They often include things like ear plugs or hearing protection, sunglasses, quiet fidgets, and communication boards.
They’re becomming more common at public locations like museums, sports venues, zoos, fairs, and the like. Even our local police department here has them for when they run into autistic kids on the site of accidents and other police matters.
Users or caregivers can typically borrow a bag while they’re at the event, and then return it when they leave (although some are meant to be given away, many events loan the bag, and expect at least some of it to be returned).
We’d like to see them at more Pagan festivals and other events.
So, while we’re putting together more information and documentation on the site, we’d also like to start on one of our first major projects – building some of these sensory bags, so that we can make them available at various events.
We’d love to have your assistance. See our Amazon Wish List below for things we need for them, but we’ll also happily take items you have that you have extras of if they’re the sort of thing that can be sanitized or if they’re unused. We’re also interested in finding some inflatable wiggle seats and rolls of stretchy resistance bands (the kind physical therapists cut off lengths of for home exercises).
We have a few things to put together here to add to them that we can’t just buy on Amazon, so we’re working on that in the background.
That said, we’re also interested in finding sponsors to help cover the costs of things that get used up – sponsors will be included on an informational brochure that will be included in each bag.
And, if you’re hosting an event in Michigan (within a couple hours drive of Troy), and you’d like to have bags like this at your event, let’s talk. We’d love to work out an arrangement with you for your event.