CHANGEMAKERS PLAYFEST 2025: Creating Power Through Play If there are two things that define Global Play Brigade, it’s this: First, we love to experiment. We breathe it, build with it, and follow through. GPB isn’t just curious; we are invested in the process and its lessons. Secondly, we love partnerships. Whenever we see an organization dreaming in the direction we dream, we run toward them joyfully, arms open, ready to build something bigger, wider, and wilder. These two parts of who we are collided beautifully at the Changemakers Playfest 2025. GPB featured on Day One of the Performing The World (PTW) 2025, titled: Meandering Through the Mess . It was a conference within a conference, a global playground nestled inside another. Woven into the PTW ecosystem, the energy was electric. GPB’s Executive Director, Rita Ezenwa-Okoro, opened the Changemakers Play Festival with words that set the tone. She spoke of faith and turning mess into message, how changemakers need to navigate complexities without succumbing to burnout, and how play offers a radical way to imagine new possibilities and create hope. Watch Rita’s speech here! One of the participants reflected: “Rita’s speech didn’t just inspire; it was tactile, lived, and actionable. Her words invited participants to sit with complexity without fear, to recognize that navigating mess isn’t chaos, it’s courage in motion.” One of the facilitators added: “Her remarks slowed everyone down, encouraging a collective meandering, turning abstract ideas into lived experience. The festival began not with instruction, but with invitation: to play, to explore, and to build together.” The Art of Connected Conversations playshop turned ordinary talk into bridges. Led by Cathy Salit (USA) and Kahlil Bagatsing (Philippines/USA), participants discovered that listening can be playful, bold, and transformative. “I never knew a conversation could feel like a bridge,” one participant reflected. Their conversations became a space for curiosity, care, and co-creation. Teamwork Makes the Dreamwork sparked laughter and delightful absurdity. Hikaru Hie (Japan), Yvette Alcott (Australia), and Toto Carandang (Philippines) invited participants into improvisational chaos. Everyone became experts at impossible tasks, discovering that teamwork thrives in trust, surprise, and shared play. Power Games in the Workplace / Los Juegos de Poder en Ambientes de Trabajo made invisible dynamics visible. Viviane Carrijo (Brazil), Jordan Hirsch (USA), and Carlos Gaviria (Colombia) guided participants through theater games exploring dominance, influence, and collaboration. One participant reflected, “I’ve been both the oppressor and the oppressed, and play can help us imagine new ways forward.” Power became something to explore, understand, and transform together. Connection and intimacy unfolded in unexpected ways. In one exercise, participants shared the (his)story of their names and responded to each other with curiosity and reflection. Strangers became collaborators within minutes. The festival showed that play isn’t just fun, it’s a strategy for building trust, creativity, and global community. Across continents and cultures, laughter, improvisation, and shared curiosity revealed our common humanity, while playful experimentation offered new ways to imagine, collaborate, and lead with care.

HEART & POWER: Bringing the World Closer to Wellness In a world where over 1 billion people are living with mental-health disorders and only one in five get the help they need, Global Play Brigadiers converged this past August at our Heart and Power Playshop to explore the question: How can we bring the world closer to wellness through play? Our carefully curated playshops included: In Embodied Empathy , people didn’t just talk about feelings; they moved them. One participant described the moment they felt another person’s sadness through a simple hand gesture, saying, “It was like my body understood before my mind did.” Guided by Christopher Ellinger (USA) and Jacek Kulkuk (Poland), the Zoom room softened. People softened. Empathy became physical. In What Is Wellness? , a big shift happened. Someone said, “I always thought wellness was personal, but now I see it’s something we build together.” With Lambert Oigara (Kenya), Jeff Gordon (Israel), Jenn Bullock (USA), and Muneeb ur Rehman (Pakistan), wellness became communal, a shared construction site where everyone created new tools. Imagine watching someone’s story turn into choreography; a literal dance of lived experience. Led by Ruben Reyes (Spain), Zara Barryte (USA), Sally Oimbo (Kenya), and Prudence Omale (Nigeria), Story-o-graphy gave participants a chance to see their stories move through another person’s body. It wasn’t just creative. It was healing. Rainbows of Emotions gave us the full colour spectrum of human feelings, from joy to grief to curiosity to frustration. It finally made sense that emotions aren’t good or bad… they’re information, one participant reflected. Steered by Ishita Sanyal (India), Manisita Khastagir (India), Rick Horner (USA), and Medhavi Parmar (India), people painted emotional rainbows with movement, sound, and imagination. Heart & Power didn’t end when Zoom closed. It ignited a new awareness that wellness isn’t a luxury, but a shared responsibility. People walked away with softer hearts, deeper breaths, and a renewed sense of connection across borders, cultures, and personal histories. It reminded us that play can be a global mental-health intervention. It can be one that honours the emotional, cultural, spiritual, and embodied realities. To every participant who danced, moved, cried, laughed, breathed, and played with us, we say THANK YOU. To our brilliant Playcilitators, thank you for guiding the world with courage and creativity. To our hosts, Rita Ezenwa-Okoro (Nigeria), Charly Ford (USA), Murray Dabby (USA), and Medhavi Parmar (India), your presence set the tone on both days. And to our indispensable tech team, you made HEART AND POWER come to life! Click to listen to the insightful musings on Heart & Power by Rita, our Executive Director! Click here to read the collaborative poem created by Heart & Power participants!

Heart and Power You can count on me in a more peaceful world, where collective power rises softly our heart, our strongest muscle, working our whole life. Playing is the outward evidence of wellness, listening to the rhythm of your heartbeat, because play heals. Try to have joy in life every day inhaling the wind, opening our lungs, laughing together. Sing, sing, sing reaching out to join our hands and hearts with courage and grace. Having heart is a meaningful start, so do your part together we co-create new possibilities for wellness in the world. Listening into creating responses, fly… Physical presence, or a respectful, trustful distance both create space for new possibilities. Play with our heart while empowering others with love, because we’re in it to win it, and the heart is a source of power. Flow freely in the world together we are powerful, together we heal. We dance our stories together, breaking vicious cycles together, with courage and kindness, we walk together. together we heal. Our heart rules our health and our evolution. Power comes from full hearts dancing together tender hearts, caring minds together we love and embrace differences with joy. (This poem was created from the chat comments of Heart and Power.)

GPB Ambassador, Susan Hillyard, Shares her Vision for the Future of Education Hear ye, hear ye! GPB has its very first GPB Correspondent. That’s right (snap!). She is Godsdelight Agu, a writer, storyteller, and mental health advocate from Lagos, Nigeria. She has been on a quest to get to know more about our Global Play Brigadiers. Her discoveries? The genius, heartfelt, and artful stories of Brigadier Susan Hillyard (Argentina). The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Traditional teaching methods are why schools are full of “dullards.” This was a term I couldn’t wave off after my hour-long conversation with educator, author, teacher trainer, facilitator, and play activist, Susan Hillyard. For almost four decades, Susan has taken on the challenging yet rewarding task of educating students of all ages. She has worked in over 17 countries, including Argentina, China, Singapore, Spain, and Saudi Arabia, and early on, she experienced the limitations of traditional (i.e., dullard) teaching methods, especially after seeing how learners struggled with English as a Second Language. This inspired Susan to create her signature teaching method (SHELTA) , which adds drama training to the Second Language Acquisition theory. Whether teaching English to special needs children in Argentina, at the Ministry of Education in Buenos Aires, to professors in China, or educators across the world, she is a staunch believer in making education more inclusive. Susan has long felt that drama was key to that, but since joining the GPB, she now feels that play across ages and stages creates the necessary environment for that. When I asked Susan why play is so important in education, she took a long pause and spoke from her heart: “ Because play reduces stress. Play improves mood and cognitive development. Play helps in building community and fostering better communication among students.” Susan believes that learners shouldn’t just have a high Intelligence Quotient (IQ), but a high Play Quotient (PQ) too. Her dream, along with GPB, is to make play mainstream in education. Susan told me about a recent presentation she gave at the SHARE Convention in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The convention was titled, Transforming English Teaching for Global Impact. Susan’s session, " Play at Any Age, at Every Stage" , was about the need for playful learning to enhance student engagement, to reduce stress, and the importance of play throughout different stages of life. Her session was attended by young learners, older students, and managers of English Language Teaching schools. Like all of Susan’s presentations, it was infused with playful activities, giving participants a felt experience of the transformative power of play. I was so inspired hearing this and other stories she shared about how non-English speakers rapidly become able to converse in English through play, youthful offenders becoming performers, and special needs children learning faster and more easily. I can’t help but imagine how much fun learning would be and how different our world would be if more educators were like Susan. This is why we’re dedicated to upping the PQ (Play Quotient), as Susan says. Let’s make Play Mainstream!

GPB Africa leader, Lambert Oigara, on his Discovery of the Magic of Art in Psychology Hear ye, hear ye! GPB has its very first GPB Correspondent. That’s right (snap!). She is Godsdelight Agu, a writer, storyteller, and mental health advocate from Lagos, Nigeria. She has been on a quest to get to know more about our Global Play Brigadiers. Her discoveries? The genius, heartfelt, and artful stories of Brigadier Lambert Oigara (Kenya). The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Lambert never planned to be a psychologist. As a boy, he simply wanted to follow in the footsteps of his uncle, a celebrated artist who travelled the world. He described his uncle with a softness that only comes from deep admiration. But then, almost in a whisper, he told me his uncle died by suicide. That loss didn’t just shape him. It rerouted his entire life. In the middle of grief, he found himself flipping through his mother’s textbooks when she was studying HIV counselling. He wasn’t looking for answers, just comfort. In that “flipping the pages”, he noticed something that tugged at him: Why were there drawings in books about mental health? Could art really heal? That small curiosity became the beginning of everything. When Lambert discovered Art Therapy, it was like the missing piece of his world clicked into place. Art and psychology didn’t have to live apart. They could meet, merge, and give people what words sometimes couldn’t. Fresh out of high school, he was invited to work in a psychiatric unit as an Art Facilitator, long before he had any professional training. That first opportunity set him on a path that has now stretched over twenty years. As he spoke about hustling through part-time classes at the University of Nairobi in Kenya while working three days a week in the psychiatric unit, I could hear both pride and gratitude. He didn’t wait for perfect conditions. He built his career while helping people heal. Then came his Master’s in Clinical Psychology at USIU-Africa, another step toward combining science with the creative heart he never lost. Today, Lambert’s approach to therapy feels like a blend of everything he has lived - expressive arts, movement, play, and clinical psychology. He doesn’t treat people from a distance; he meets them where they are, with colour, rhythm, and curiosity. He told me about working with clients navigating anxiety, depression, and schizoaffective disorders. The way he described them was filled with respect, not labels. “People bloom when they feel safe,” he said, and in his hands, therapy becomes a space for blooming. This belief came even more alive for Lambert during the recent Heart and Power Playshop, where he co-facilitated a GPB session for the first time, “What is Wellness?” Listening to him describe that experience, it was clear the playshop wasn’t just an event. It was a reminder: “Wellness isn’t a destination. It’s a reflection. It’s enrichment. It’s the courage to be vulnerable in front of people who hold you kindly.” Lambert carries this philosophy into CBT Kenya, the private practice he built, and into his work with GPB Africa and the Mental Health Ensemble. He sees play not as a technique but as a way of life, especially for people working in mental health. Before we ended our conversation, he left me with a sentence that stayed with me long after: “Play is important in mental health because it makes us whole.” And hearing his story, from childhood dreams to deep loss, from art to healing, I understood exactly what he meant.

One of our newest brigadiers, Ohemaa Poku, is changing the Future of Mental Health Hear ye, hear ye! GPB has its very first GPB Correspondent. That’s right (snap!). She is Godsdelight Agu, a writer, storyteller, and mental health advocate from Lagos, Nigeria. She has been on a quest to get to know more about our Global Play Brigadiers. Her discoveries? The genius, heartfelt, and artful stories of Brigadier Ohemaa Poku (USA). The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Assistant Professor Ohemaa Poku, PhD, MPH, MSW, grew up at the intersection of three worlds: the United States, the Caribbean, and Ghana. Ohemaa shared with me that throughout her childhood, mental health simply wasn’t something people talked about. As she spoke, I could hear the weight of the cultural silence she grew up around. Silence in the home, among friends, and even among relatives who were doctors and nurses. What moved me was that what has come to be her life’s work didn’t come from academic curiosity; it came from personal absence, and that gap stayed with her. It made her wonder: " If we don’t talk about this, how many people are suffering in the shadows?" Instead of turning away, she leaned in. She chose a path that many people in her communities didn’t even have a language for yet. And she wanted to serve African and immigrant populations, those who carry not just the burden of illness, but the burden of cultural expectations, migration stress, and stigma. As she shared the story of her journey, from her role as Assistant Professor of Global Mental Health at Columbia University, to teaching the next generation of clinicians, to her research with adolescents, I realized how deeply personal all of this is for her. Teaching isn’t a job; it’s her way of giving others the tools she wished her own community had while growing up. And so not surprisingly, one of the most rewarding parts of her job is “watching people grow into the professionals our communities need.” But the part of our conversation that surprised me most was when she began talking about play. For years, she worked in traditional research and clinical spaces, including a mentorship with One Mind . But joining the Global Play Brigade (GPB) shifted something. She described GPB like a breath of fresh air; a space where psychologists, social workers, and psychiatrists come together not just to talk about mental health but to humanize it. Play, she believes, does what lectures and charts often cannot do. It lowers defenses. It invites connection. It turns discomfort into courage. And in communities where stigma runs deep, play can open doors that therapy alone struggles to unlock. By the end of our conversation, I wasn’t thinking about her credentials. I was thinking about the young people she studies, the immigrant families she advocates for, and the future professionals she trains. I was thinking about how much it matters that someone like her exists in these spaces. Ohemaa isn’t just researching mental health; she’s rewriting who gets to talk about it, who gets to access it, and what it looks like when culture, compassion, and play meet. She does this through her work as an Assistant Professor of Global Mental Health (in Psychiatry) and Director of Education and Training Initiatives for the Columbia-WHO Center for Global Mental Health at Columbia University, where she shapes the minds of her students, who in turn become future mental health professionals. She believes play can help us change the conversation. After listening to her story, I believe Ohemaa is right.

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.

PLAYTELLIGENCE 2025 : Reimagining Learning In a world where traditional education often sidelines the importance of curiosity and joy, the PLAYTELLIGENCE Global Playshop 2025 emerged as a beacon of transformative learning. Hosted by the Global Play Brigade , this dynamic event welcomed 210 participants from 25 countries , representing 67 organizations —all united by a common belief: play is not just a fun activity; it’s an essential form of intelligence. Playtelligence is a term coined by GPB, it fuses ‘Play’ with ‘Intelligence,’ signifying an innovative way to approach education. It challenges outdated norms, suggesting that learning thrives not in rigidity but in curiosity, engaged collaboration, and yes, laughter. Playtelligence participants didn’t sit passively; instead, they embraced the unknown, danced with mistakes, explored environmental concerns through creative lenses, and rediscovered the joy of learning. Workshops that reshaped how educators and learners perceive growth and development. Susan Hillyard , a sociologist of education in Argentina and one of our inspiring hosts, reflected: “It’s beautiful to see teachers freed up to play. That’s what I witnessed at Playtelligence! The Educator Ensemble did a wonderful job bringing together such talented educators to facilitate a variety of offerings.” Luke Perone , a professor of psychology and human development in Hawaii, shared his thoughts on the closing session: “The final gathering was open and hopeful. There was genuine appreciation for the tools learned in small groups, and the collective energy was palpable.” A student participant reflected on the "Let's Dance with Mistakes" session: “The experience was both enriching and inspiring. Engaging with participants from so many countries fostered a sense of community. I left feeling energized and motivated to incorporate playful approaches into my own educational practices.” We celebrated diversity with sessions in English, Spanish, and Bengali , ensuring inclusivity and global participation. Translation tools enabled rich, cross-cultural exchanges , proving once again that imagination knows no borders . The impact of Playtelligence 2025 extends beyond the event itself. It has sown seeds of change in hearts and minds across the world. The vision is clear: to create joyful, collective, messy, and alive learning environments where both educators and students thrive through play. A special shout-out to the Brigadiers who produced and co-created PLAYTELLIGENCE: Susan Hillyard (Argentina), Luke Perone (USA), Toto Carandang (Philippines), Hikaru Hie (Japan), Mamiko Miyamoto (Japan), Vivianne Carrijo (Brazil), Levi Correa (Brazil), Manuela Kelly (Italy), Gwen Lowenheim (USA), Jim Martinez (USA), Meiko Kojima (Japan), Connie Shui-Yi (USA), Nancy Li (USA), Barbara A. Michaels (USA), Wycliffe Barasa (Kenya), Cristina Gioveni (Argentina), Carolyn Sealfon(Canada), Manolo Lopez (Spain), Ruben Reyes (Spain), Mariela Mondaca (Argentina), Manisita Khastaghir, Rev. Rodney Borneo (India), Ishita Sanyal (India) and Barbara Natalizia (USA). A big THANK YOU to our awesome tech team - Sarah Filman, Zara Barryte and Diane Whitehouse - thanks for being the true heroes behind-the-scenes, and making sure we all could stay connected and enjoy the session. Special thanks to YAHE & Cultivating Ensembles, for partnering with Global Play Brigade in making Playtelligence 2025 a huge success! As we look forward to the next Global Playshop called Heart and Power , we carry with us the giggles, belly laughs, meaningful gestures, and heartfelt connections formed during this transformative event. Until then, let’s all keep playing it forward .