GRIT & the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future. Adopted by all United Nations Member States, these 17 goals are a call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure well-being for all. GRIT (Games for Resilience and Interactive Transformation) directly supports 12 of these goals by empowering crisis-affected, displaced, and at-risk communities to heal, rebuild, and thrive.
Whether responding to war in Gaza and Ukraine, wildfire-impacted towns in California, or climate resilience efforts in New York, GRIT uses culturally grounded, trauma-informed, play-based methods to restore emotional well-being, re-engage learning, foster inclusion, and strengthen community resilience. These interventions help ensure that recovery is not only possible—but sustainable.
SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being
Addressing Invisible Wounds: GRIT provides urgent, trauma-informed mental health support using evidence-based, culturally sensitive approaches. Through structured roleplay and narrative therapy, participants of all ages are guided by trained facilitators and mental health professionals to process grief, stress, and trauma in a safe environment.
Promoting Emotional Regulation: By integrating therapeutic play into community support systems, GRIT reduces long-term psychological harm, promotes emotional regulation, and enhances psychosocial well-being. Early intervention helps prevent chronic mental health conditions like PTSD, depression, and anxiety, which often arise in post-crisis contexts.
Best Practices in Trauma-Informed Care: Each therapeutic LARP session is designed in collaboration with mental health practitioners to ensure emotional scaffolding, safety protocols, and structured debriefing, aligning with global best practices in trauma-informed care.
SDG 4: Quality Education
Restoring Readiness to Learn: For children and youth, trauma can disrupt concentration, memory, and the ability to learn. GRIT helps restore cognitive readiness by giving participants the emotional tools they need to re-engage in education.
Alternative Pathways Through Play: The program uses experiential learning and live-action roleplay to develop emotional literacy, empathy, and problem-solving skills—core components of educational success, especially in disrupted or informal learning environments.
Training Local Educators: GRIT builds educator capacity by training local staff to adapt and deliver trauma-informed programming. These facilitators integrate healing-centered approaches into schools, shelters, and learning hubs, expanding education access to vulnerable youth.
SDG 5: Gender Equity
Building Empathy and Inclusion: GRIT uses roleplay to help participants practice perspective-taking, empathy, and mutual respect across differences. These experiences can open space for deeper understanding of gendered experiences and support more inclusive community relationships.
Creating Safer Social Dynamics: Through guided facilitation, participants rehearse communication, boundary-setting, and collaborative problem-solving in ways that strengthen dignity and belonging for all genders.
Supporting Equitable Participation: GRIT’s structured, trauma-informed format helps ensure that voices often excluded in traditional settings have meaningful opportunities to participate, lead, and be heard.
SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth
Building Employable Skills: Through its game-based modules and design challenges, GRIT fosters collaboration, communication, leadership, and creative problem-solving—skills essential for today’s workforce.
Training Local Facilitators: By training community members to lead LARP and design sessions, GRIT creates employment pathways, particularly in regions with high youth unemployment or limited job opportunities.
Empowering Youth and Adults: GRIT supports social entrepreneurship by encouraging self-expression, ownership, and future-oriented thinking. These tools enhance long-term employability and help cultivate new, locally relevant economic roles.
SDG 9: Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure
Unlocking Cognitive Capacity: Healing trauma reclaims emotional and cognitive bandwidth. GRIT creates the mental space for innovation, critical thinking, and visionary leadership—especially in crisis-affected communities.
Fostering Creative Problem Solving: Participants explore local challenges through scenario-based games and design workshops, gaining hands-on experience in solution-building that supports entrepreneurship and innovation.
Strengthening Social Infrastructure: GRIT’s scalable model embeds healing practices in institutions such as schools and NGOs, contributing to resilient infrastructure capable of evolving with the community’s needs.
SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities
Centering the Most Vulnerable: GRIT prioritizes displaced populations, refugees, and marginalized communities by providing low-barrier access to mental health support, creativity, and leadership development.
Local Adaptation and Access: Its modular, non-digital format allows it to be adapted across languages, cultural contexts, and literacy levels. This inclusivity ensures participation even in under-resourced areas.
Restoring Agency and Belonging: By positioning participants as decision-makers and heroes in their own narratives, GRIT helps restore agency and challenges the passive roles often assigned to crisis-affected populations.
SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities
Rebuilding Social Fabric: GRIT helps restore trust and cooperation by engaging community members in storytelling and co-creation. These activities rebuild the interpersonal bonds needed for safe, inclusive neighborhoods.
Providing Stabilizing Routines: Especially in shelters, refugee camps, and post-disaster towns, GRIT offers structured, predictable, healing-centered experiences that reduce stress and support positive coping.
Fostering Local Ownership: Training local facilitators ensures program continuity and embeds recovery tools in community systems, supporting longer-term resilience and reducing displacement pressures.
SDG 13: Climate Action
Inspiring Action Through Experience: GRIT uses transformative education and immersive storytelling to help participants emotionally connect with climate challenges and imagine their role in responding to them.
Strengthening Climate Resilience: By combining psychosocial support with community-based learning, GRIT helps people build the emotional readiness, cooperation, and problem-solving capacity needed in climate-affected contexts.
Turning Learning Into Engagement: Climate-related roleplay and design activities move participants beyond awareness toward action, encouraging local ownership of resilience and recovery efforts.
SDG 14: Life Below Water
Advancing Ocean Science Education: GRIT uses immersive educational adventures to engage learners in marine science, ocean conservation, and the interconnected systems that sustain life below water.
Fostering Stewardship Through Story: By placing participants inside meaningful environmental narratives, GRIT helps build empathy for aquatic ecosystems and a stronger sense of responsibility for their protection.
Making Conservation Memorable: Experiential learning increases engagement and retention, helping ocean literacy become more accessible, participatory, and action-oriented.
SDG 15: Life On Land
Supporting Earth Science and Conservation Education: GRIT brings environmental learning to life through interactive experiences that help participants explore ecosystems, biodiversity, and land stewardship in memorable ways.
Deepening Connection to the Natural World: Roleplay and narrative-based learning encourage participants to see themselves as part of the ecological systems around them, strengthening care for land, wildlife, and habitat preservation.
Encouraging Community Action: By pairing knowledge with emotional engagement, GRIT helps inspire conservation-minded choices and community participation in protecting local environments.
SDG 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions
Healing as Prevention: GRIT addresses the emotional and psychological drivers of conflict by helping participants process trauma, build empathy, and explore peaceful alternatives through role-based experiences.
Promoting Nonviolent Conflict Resolution: The program teaches de-escalation, perspective-taking, and inclusive decision-making in safe, fictional settings, which translate into real-life social behaviors.
Institutional Capacity Building: GRIT strengthens local institutions—schools, youth programs, and NGOs—by integrating healing-based frameworks and training staff in trauma-informed approaches.
SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals
Building Cross-Sector Collaboration: GRIT brings together educators, mental health professionals, cultural advisors, game designers, and community leaders to co-create programs that are locally meaningful and globally relevant. This collaborative model strengthens the quality, adaptability, and reach of each intervention.
Supporting Cultural Adaptation: By training local facilitators and working in partnership with community-based organizations, GRIT ensures that programs can be shaped by local knowledge, language, and lived experience. This helps build trust and increases long-term sustainability.
Expanding Impact Through Shared Expertise: Research partners, implementation partners, and on-the-ground stakeholders each contribute essential insight to the GRIT model. These partnerships support evidence-informed practice, scalable delivery, and stronger outcomes across diverse settings.
