LOCAL HERO
Oluwa Shittu
founder of
written by //Kabbo Hue Ferdinand
Introducing: Oluwa Shittu, the founder and director of Play Wooden CIC. Company motto: “A world of creative entertainment. Fun for both adults and children! Ethical and ecological reinvented wooden games with imagination and purpose.”
Play
Wooden
social enterprise which offers alternative ecological wooden games for children and adults. We offer play activities in schools and after, in parks, workshops at festivals, including team-building experiences with corporates. We are able to offer activities wherever people gather to play and have fun.
//Kabbo: Goes without saying, the lockdowns have left us all a bit jaded, isolated, suspicious and scared. And what is the better way for us to reconnect to ourselves and each other than through playing. I’ve spent time with Oluwa and his offering and have come away feeling stimulated, grounded and inspired. I thought it would be good to introduce you all to this visionary man, who started this business to encourage and introduce more playfulness into our fractured world. Oluwa, please, introduce yourself. Oluwa: Good afternoon. My name is Oluwa Shtitu, I’m the founder and one of the directors for Play Wooden CIC. We are a small, leading
//Kabbo: What is your motivation and how do you maintain your drive? Oluwa: My motivation is to embrace the child in me, who is always alive and representing me in everything I do. I believe we must always enchant the importance of play in life, as we grow from child to adult. Playing plays a very important role in our cognitive development from childhood and does not change when we become adults. Secondly, our games are environmentally friendly. We do not use plastic or toxic materials. The only exception is that we use foam wrapped in ethically sourced Afrikan material to create soft games in order to accommodate our smaller children. //Kabbo: What are the cognitive benefits for playing? Oluwa: As Maria Montessori once said; “Play is the work of the child”, their language and it comes in multiple forms and dialects. It’s innumerable. In fact, it comes in hundreds of thousands of forms. Play is the means by which they express themselves and engage with the world around them.
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