Why should I partner with GRIT?
Help Heal, Rebuild, and Empower
Join GRIT in bringing play-based healing and resilience-building to communities across the globe.
Nearly 1 in 5 children around the world—over 473 million—are growing up surrounded by war, violence, displacement, oppression, and loss. These aren’t just statistics. They are young lives shaped by trauma, fear, and grief no child should ever have to endure.
Many adults and children struggle to express their emotions, and traditional therapy often fails to engage them in meaningful healing.
But there is hope.
Therapists using live action role-playing and tabletop therapy games are seeing remarkable breakthroughs in record time. There have been multiple findings that children who once sat silent and withdrawn after therapy now run eagerly to their parents, excited to share their experiences. Another finding described how weeks of therapeutic role-playing games have achieved results that would have taken years with traditional talk therapy.
GRIT — Games for Resilience and Interactive Transformation harnesses this powerful approach to support war-affected children and their families, helping them process trauma and build their capacity for recovering both personally and economically.
Example: The Reality of War
Conflict, displacement, and disaster leave deep scars on individuals and communities—scars that are often invisible. In regions like Gaza and Ukraine, the numbers speak to a collective trauma that affects not just children, but adults too:
CHILDREN
Gaza
According to Save the Children:
- 80% of children live with depression, grief, and fear
- Over 50% have contemplated suicide
- 3 in 5 engage in self-harm
- At least 5,230 children in 2024 alone were injured and face potential lifelong disabilities
Ukraine
According to Save the Children and World Vision:
- 1.5 million children are at risk of PTSD and depression
- Over 2,500 children killed or injured in 3 years of war
- 83% of children say safety is one of their top three worries
- 51% say peers are turning to smoking and other addictions to cope
- Nearly 1.2 million children are missing out on full-time, in-person education
ADULTS
Gaza
- More than 60% of adults in Gaza are estimated to suffer from PTSD and severe depression
- Psychosocial support is critically lacking, with fewer than 2 psychiatrists per 100,000 people
Ukraine
- One in five adults in Ukraine is estimated to experience a mental health disorder due to the war
- Over 9 million people are projected to need mental health and psychosocial support, including trauma-related care.
Learn more in our UN Policy Brief on how transformative games advance trauma recovery and global development.
What is GRIT?
GRIT is a pioneering live-action role-playing game system with therapeutic and cognitive benefits, designed to help all ages heal from the invisible wounds of trauma. This innovative program is being developed by a global collaboration with people from USA, Norway, Canada, Palestine, Jordan, Ukraine, Greece, Georgia, Pakistan, Sweden, Mauritius, Venezuela and more.
Through interactive role-playing and facilitated debrief, participants explore emotions, develop coping strategies, and safely process trauma in a structured yet imaginative setting. Unlike traditional talk therapy, GRIT allows children, teens, and adults to express their emotions through the characters they play, creating a natural and effective way to engage in healing. This solution is ideal for cultures where therapy carries a stigma – because the process is game based and collaborative. But the therapeutic and cognitive results still apply.
Our objective is twofold: Help survivors process and work through their trauma, and through this, impact their capacity to rebuild their lives, homes, communities, and economy. Trauma limits functionality. By improving their ability to work with their experience, people can successfully carry out development projects, from planning and execution to sustaining the results over the long term.
Bridging Culture, Play and Healing
At Cultura Connector, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit NGO, we believe in the power of transformative games to support healing and resilience. By working with affected communities, we ensure their stories, identities, and lived experiences are authentically represented in the process.
Our role is to facilitate spaces where cultural expression, self-discovery, and emotional well-being can emerge through play. GRIT embodies this mission by offering a culturally led (as opposed to just culturally responsive), trauma-informed approach to mental health support for survivors.
Funds can pour into post-crisis affected areas but if the population suffers from trauma, their ability to build capacity and manage those funds is severely limited. In fact, their ability to even learn new concepts is profoundly hampered. They will be chained to survivor mode with limited ability to adapt and grow until the trauma they carry is process. This is a Train-the-Trainer program so that the members of the affected culture can lead the initiative and enact change, building both their resilience and their capacity at the same time. As the program spreads, so does the capacity building of the region… followed by sustained economic recovery.
A Global Collaboration for Change
GRIT is built through a consortium of organizations and experts. Example collaborations include:
✔ Cultural Advisors (Ukraine)
Expert Guidance from Global Leaders
GRIT is shaped and driven by an extraordinary team of experts, innovators, policy advisors, and industry leaders who bring unparalleled experience in childhood development, trauma recovery, storytelling, and immersive play-based learning. Our development and advisory team includes people at or who have worked at
✔ Sesame Street
✔ Harvard Graduate School of Education
✔ Disney
✔ LEGO
✔ Accenture
✔ Discord
✔ Uppsala University
GRIT is developed and led in partnership with trauma-informed therapists and facilitators to ensure safety, effectiveness, and lasting impact. Their expertise ensures that every aspect of the program is scientifically sound, culturally relevant, and deeply transformative for children in crisis-affected regions.
The program is designed to be adapted and adjusted over time to address not just trauma, but also to support education, capacity building, and economic recovery. This is done by addressing the people’s personal capacity so that they can enact the development strategies for success.
Want to Help Shape GRIT?
If you’re a cultural advisor or educator with deep ties to your community, we’d love to work with you. Join the Cultura Connector directory at culturaconnector.net and help us co-create GRIT games that are culturally rooted, respectful, and truly impactful. Your voice can shape healing where it’s needed most.
Why Fund this Initiative?
Direct Impact
Your funding directly supports the development and operation of this innovative program, giving people of all ages in post crisis areas access to a safe, engaging, and effective mental health intervention. Unlike traditional talk therapy, transformative game design integrates role-playing with professional therapy, offering a creative and emotionally secure way for children, teens, and adults to process trauma.
Evidence Driven
Traditional group therapy often struggles to engage children (and adults). However play therapy, specifically role-playing games, has shown to have both significant potential and more immediate effects.
Research shows that children are more likely to express their emotions through the characters they play, especially those facing challenges, rather than speaking directly about themselves. This process allows them to integrate feedback for their character that they can also internalize and apply to their own lived experience.
To ensure the program’s effectiveness, a neutral third party will conduct studies comparing GRIT to traditional group therapy. Our long-term goal is to expand this model beyond Gaza and Ukraine, bringing healing to survivors in conflict zones worldwide.
Building Peace – Internally and Externally
By helping participants process trauma in a safe, creative space, we are giving them the opportunity to heal, regain a sense of normalcy, and rebuild their sense of self. From here, they have more mental and emotional capacity to rebuild their communities and economy.
When trauma goes unaddressed, it can lead to feelings of hopelessness, isolation, and cycles of violence. Providing them with positive outlets for expression, connection, and emotional support reduces the risk of future instability and the spread of harmful ideologies that thrive in times of crisis and uncertainty.
This program offers a path toward resilience and empowerment – both personally and economically, helping all ages move forward with strength and purpose. By investing in their recovery today, we are fostering stability, security, and lasting peace for them and for the world.
Your Role in This Mission
With your partnership, we can launch GRIT in a region, adapting the program to local cultures in collaboration with therapists, facilitators, and community leaders. Our team delivers intensive on-site training and mentorship to empower local staff, providing trauma-informed care to ages 4 and up.
We also suggest an independent study to evaluate GRIT’s effectiveness against traditional group therapy. If results confirm what early outcomes already suggest, we plan to scale GRIT to 50 additional post-crisis locations within three years, reaching over 1 million individuals in need of healing and support.
Whether you fund a single region, training round, or full initiative, your contribution directly enables recovery, resilience, and hope.
Join us in sowing seeds of peace through play. Your partnership brings lasting change to those affected by crisis and displacement—across generations.
Reach out today to find out how you or your organization can make a lasting impact.
SOURCES
- Abbott, Matthew S., Kimberly A. Stauss, and Allen F. Burnett. 2021. “Table-top Role-playing Games as a Therapeutic Intervention with Adults to Increase Social Connectedness.” Social Work with Groups 45, no. 1 (16-21).
- Arenas, Daniel Luccas, Anna Viduani, and Renata Brasil Araujo. 2022. “Therapeutic Use of Role-Playing Game (RPG) in Mental Health: A Scoping Review.” Simulation & Gaming (March 2022).
- Baker, Ian S., Ian J. Turner, and Yasuhiro Kotera. 2022. “Role-play Games (RPGs) for Mental Health (Why Not?): Roll for Initiative.” International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction 11: 1-9.
- Blackmon, Wayne D. 1994. “Dungeons and Dragons: The Use of a Fantasy Game in the Psychotherapeutic Treatment of a Young Adult.” American Journal of Psychotherapy 48 (4): 624–632.
- Bowman, Sarah Lynne, and Andreas Lieberoth. 2024. “Psychology and Role-playing Games.” In The Routledge Handbook of Role-playing Game Studies, edited by José P. Zagal and Sebastian Deterding, 261-279. London: Routledge.
- Enfield, George. 2007. “Becoming the Hero: The Use of Role-playing Games in Psychotherapy.” In Using Superheroes in Counseling and Play, edited by Lawrence C. Rubin, 227-242. Springer.
- Hughes, John. 1988. “Therapy Is Fantasy: Roleplaying, Healing and the Construction of Symbolic Order.” In Paper Presented in Anthropology IV Honours, Medical Anthropology Seminar, Canberra, Australia.
- Mendoza, Jonathan. 2020. “Gaming Intentionally: A Literature Review of the Viability of Role-playing Games as Drama-therapy-informed Interventions.” Master’s Thesis, Lesley University.