GRIT & the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a shared global framework for improving human well-being, reducing inequality, protecting the planet, and building peaceful, resilient communities.
GRIT (Games for Resilience and Interactive Transformation) is designed to contribute to 12 of these goals through two connected areas of work. Its post-crisis programs support children, youth, and communities affected by war, displacement, disaster, and loss. Its youth well-being programs help young people strengthen relationships, navigate digital and social pressures, connect across differences, and prepare for future challenges.
GRIT uses culturally responsive, trauma-informed narrative roleplay to create supported spaces for exploration, skill-building, and reflection. Local partners and participants help define the outcomes, shape the scenarios, and determine how progress will be assessed. Each implementation focuses on the SDGs most relevant to the community’s priorities and the program’s evidence plan.
SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being
Supporting Post-Crisis Resilience: GRIT provides structured, trauma-informed experiences where people affected by crisis or displacement can rebuild connection, practice coping skills, and regain a sense of agency within a supportive community.
Strengthening Youth Well-being: GRIT can help young people explore digital stress, social pressure, emotional awareness, help-seeking, and supportive relationships. Fully analog sessions also create opportunities for meaningful offline connection.
Creating Safe, Supported Experiences: Clear framing, participant consent, trained facilitation, structured debriefing, safeguarding procedures, and appropriate professional oversight help create an environment where young people can participate safely.
SDG 4: Quality Education
Rebuilding Readiness to Learn: Crisis, displacement, and prolonged stress can affect concentration, confidence, and engagement. GRIT gives young people a supported way to practice regulation, communication, and problem-solving as they reconnect with learning.
Developing Skills Through Experience: Narrative roleplay encourages curiosity, collaboration, perspective-taking, and creative thinking. Participants practice these skills through meaningful choices and reflect on how they apply to school and everyday life.
Building Local Capacity: GRIT trains educators, youth workers, and community facilitators to deliver culturally relevant, trauma-informed programming in schools, community centers, residential programs, and other learning environments.
SDG 5: Gender Equality
Supporting Equitable Participation: GRIT’s structured format gives participants multiple ways to contribute, make decisions, and take leadership within the group. Facilitators are trained to notice participation patterns and create space for voices that may otherwise be overlooked.
Exploring Perspectives Safely: Locally designed scenarios can help participants examine gender expectations, power, identity, and access while remaining within the protective distance of a fictional story.
Practicing Respectful Relationships: Participants can rehearse communication, boundary-setting, consent, cooperation, and mutual respect. These skills support healthier and more inclusive relationships across genders.
SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth
Building Future-Ready Skills: GRIT helps participants practice teamwork, communication, feedback, leadership, decision-making, and creative problem-solving. These skills contribute to career readiness and successful participation in changing workplaces.
Exploring Choices and Possibilities: Career-focused adaptations can give young people a supported environment for exploring workplace situations, identifying strengths, managing uncertainty, and considering future pathways.
Developing Local Facilitators: Funded implementations can create paid training and delivery opportunities for educators, youth workers, artists, game facilitators, and mental health professionals within participating communities.
SDG 9: Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure
Encouraging Creative Problem-Solving: Scenario-based challenges invite participants to test ideas, adapt to changing conditions, and work together toward solutions. These experiences strengthen skills associated with innovation and entrepreneurship.
Adapting One Framework to Many Contexts: GRIT’s modular, analog structure can be localized across languages, cultures, age groups, and community settings. Each adaptation retains shared safety and facilitation principles while responding to local priorities.
Strengthening Social Infrastructure: Training facilitators and establishing safeguarding, oversight, and referral pathways can help schools, nonprofits, and community organizations expand their capacity to support youth well-being and post-crisis resilience.
SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities
Expanding Access: GRIT is screen-free and can be adapted for different languages, literacy levels, cultures, and learning needs. This allows programs to reach communities where technology, connectivity, or specialized services may be limited.
Centering Local Knowledge: Community members help shape the stories, language, values, and goals used in each adaptation. This approach recognizes participants as contributors to the program rather than passive recipients of support.
Strengthening Agency and Belonging: Roleplay positions participants as decision-makers whose ideas and actions matter. Shared challenges also create opportunities to build relationships across differences and experience meaningful inclusion.
SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities
Rebuilding Community Connection: Post-crisis GRIT programs use storytelling, cooperation, and shared reflection to support trust and connection among people whose communities have been disrupted.
Creating Stabilizing Experiences: Predictable routines, clear boundaries, participant choice, and consistent facilitation can provide a sense of structure for young people navigating displacement, disaster recovery, or major transitions.
Supporting Local Ownership: GRIT prepares community members to adapt and lead the program. Local delivery helps preserve cultural relevance, build community capacity, and support continuity after an initial funded pilot ends.
SDG 13: Climate Action
Preparing for Climate-Related Disruption: GRIT can help communities explore the emotional, social, and practical challenges associated with climate emergencies, displacement, and recovery.
Practicing Cooperation and Adaptation: Climate-focused scenarios allow participants to make decisions under uncertainty, consider competing needs, and practice the collaboration required for community resilience.
Connecting Learning With Local Action: Communities can design stories around the climate issues they face, helping participants explore their roles in preparedness, stewardship, mutual aid, and locally relevant solutions.
SDG 14: Life Below Water
Making Ocean Learning Participatory: When marine well-being is a community priority, GRIT scenarios can engage participants in ocean science, conservation, and the relationships between human activity and aquatic ecosystems.
Exploring Interconnected Systems: Narrative experiences can help participants consider how environmental, economic, and community decisions affect oceans, waterways, and the people who depend on them.
Encouraging Stewardship: Reflection following the game helps participants connect fictional choices with practical opportunities to care for local waters and marine environments.
SDG 15: Life On Land
Bringing Environmental Learning to Life: GRIT can be adapted to explore biodiversity, ecosystems, land use, wildlife, and habitat protection through collaborative stories and decisions.
Connecting Culture and Place: Locally developed scenarios can incorporate community knowledge, cultural relationships with the land, and the environmental issues that matter most to participants.
Supporting Community Engagement: Participants can examine the consequences of different choices, practice balancing diverse needs, and identify ways to contribute to local conservation and resilience efforts.
SDG 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions
Practicing Peaceful Conflict Resolution: GRIT gives participants a safe fictional setting in which to rehearse dialogue, de-escalation, perspective-taking, negotiation, and collaborative decision-making.
Supporting Trust and Social Connection: Post-crisis and cultural bridge-building programs can create opportunities for participants to listen across differences, rebuild relationships, and consider multiple perspectives.
Strengthening Community Organizations: Facilitator training, safeguarding procedures, professional oversight, and transparent evaluation help schools and nonprofits build their capacity to offer safe, inclusive programming.
SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals
Building Cross-Sector Collaboration: GRIT brings together community organizations, educators, mental health professionals, cultural advisors, researchers, game designers, and funders around shared goals.
Co-designing Programs and Evidence: Local partners and participants help define success, shape the experience, and determine what information should be gathered. Research and evaluation partners help assess feasibility, intended outcomes, and areas for improvement.
Sharing Knowledge Across Communities: Each implementation contributes lessons that can strengthen future adaptations. GRIT’s wider goal is a global network of locally led programs that share training, research, and practical knowledge while remaining grounded in their own cultures and contexts.
