GLOBAL PLAY BRIGADE AT FIVE
Global Play Brigade at Five (that’s 5 years old, people!)
Five years ago, in the thick of a global pandemic and a world that was in crisis, isolated, frightened, and unsure, 75+ play and performance activists across continents asked a daunting question: How can we respond to this crisis? How can we be of support to our fellow human beings? Our answer: Let’s bring strangers across borders and barriers to PLAY together.
So we did that (in fact, many of YOU reading this did that). And now five years on, 20,000 strangers from 108 countries via 523 free playshops online made possible with 125+ volunteers have improvised, danced, listened, shared stories, clowned, cried, shouted, learned, grown, and laughed across borders, languages, and time zones.
On June 8th, 2025, we celebrated those five years of the Global Play Brigade community, in a kind of reunion, recommitment, and remembering. The border crossers showed up! We played. We reflected. We laughed. We cried. We ran a campaign in commemoration of this special milestone and tagged it a $5 for 5 years campaign. Our goal: $2,500. Guess what? Together, we hit our target; powered not by big donors, but by small, meaningful gifts from our amazing community.
And we received heartwarming love letters from many of you from across the world. Click here to read some of these loving messages to GPB.
And so you see that
GPB@5 is not the end of this playful and powerful experiment; it's the beginning of new volumes of possibilities for social change through the strategic integration of play across all ages and vocations of life.
