Kwirkz 501(c)(3) non-profit
Our mission & our story

Everyone has Kwirkz!

Kwirkz is a 501(c)(3) non-profit founded in 2019 to connect the special needs community to the people, programs and places that make real life navigable. We host social and professional networking events, and we build the connective tissue between families and the resources already around them.

A crowd of roughly fifty Kwirkz participants, families and volunteers standing together outdoors with their arms raised, in front of a Kwirkz canopy and a banner reading Everyone has them!, with a food truck and string lights behind them.
This is the community. Families, participants and volunteers at Kick it for Kwirkz in Hope Mills. The green and navy shirts are volunteers and participants, and the point of the day was that you could not tell which was which.

Our mission

To better connect the special needs community to social and professional networking opportunities.

Our vision

To cultivate opportunities for the special needs community in local communities around the USA.

About us

It started with two brothers.

Kwirkz was established in 2019 with a straightforward goal: unite people, resources and shared interests to serve individuals with special needs.

Founder Ryan Cretens started the organization after watching his brother Tyler, who is on the autism spectrum, get fewer opportunities than his peers. Not fewer abilities. Fewer invitations, fewer open doors, fewer places where showing up was simply expected. The gap was never talent. It was access.

So Kwirkz began as events. Social nights, networking, gatherings where the accommodation was built in rather than requested. What became clear quickly is that families were not short on effort, they were short on a map. The right program, the right employer, the right driver, the right group already existed somewhere, and finding it took a level of research and trust-checking that no family should have to repeat from scratch.

That is the work now: making the people, programs and places that already exist easier to find, easier to trust and easier to join, across the five areas that shape an adult life.

Founded2019 Status501(c)(3) non-profit EIN87-1423716 Programs atThe Hive, Hope Mills, NC
Three people sitting close together on a porch step, all wearing blue Kwirkz caps, with a golden retriever puppy resting across their laps. The person on the left wears a yellow Kwirkz t-shirt.
Where it started. Not a boardroom and not a business plan. A family, at home, deciding that the shortage of places their brother and son was genuinely welcome was a problem somebody had to go and fix.

Be part of what comes next.

We're building a virtual hub on top of the community we've spent years building in person. Free to join, and made for the long road of real life.

Join the waitlist →