GLOBAL PLAY BRIGADE AT FIVE

December 12, 2025

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.

Playing with Social Construction: GPB at the Taos Institute Symposium

By Danielle Speciale • June 9, 2026
Author: Sarah Filman, GPB Director of Programs

GPB and Linking Circles Academy Collaborate on Project TECI

June 9, 2026
GPB and Linking Circles Academy Collaborate on Project TECI We love a good partnership. And we really love a partnership that puts play where it belongs, in a classroom. So when Linking Circles Academy came with a vision to transform how teachers in Nigeria show up for their diverse learners, we opened the door. Fewer than half of teachers in Nigeria do not receive any training on inclusive education, and there are a lot of learners with diverse learning needs and abilities. Founded by Elizabeth Adams, a brigadier, Linking Circles is an education-focused organization on a mission to improve learning outcomes in African schools through teacher development. They've already trained over 50 teachers through virtual and in-person workshops. Project TECI (The Equitable Classroom Initiative) is their boldest move yet, aimed at training and mentoring at least 1,000 primary and secondary school teachers to design and sustain inclusive, equitable, student-centred classrooms. It's ambitious. It's necessary. And it has GPB's name all over it. Inclusive classrooms need teachers who know how to meet a room full of different minds, different stories, and make every single one of them feel like they belong. And play is one of the most powerful tools for developing exactly that. That's why GPB is stepping in as a curriculum partner for Project TECI. Through our Educators Ensemble, we're bringing our play-based and experiential learning methodologies directly into the teacher training design. GPB will be providing play-based learning resources and frameworks to shape the TECI curriculum, offering advisory and technical input, and delivering a virtual training session for TECI facilitators on how to integrate play and performance-based approaches into their work. We'll also introduce GPB's work to the educators coming through the TECI programme — because once a teacher catches the play bug, there's no telling where it spreads. We're happy to be walking this road with Linking Circles Academy. We're bringing play into spaces where it has been absent for too long. And we can't wait to see the classrooms and the children that TECI helps transform. Let's play it forward!