GRIT Ukraine: Play for Resilience
Help Heal, Rebuild, and Empower
Join GRIT in bringing play-based healing and resilience-building to Ukrainian displaced communities.
Nearly 1 in 5 children around the world are growing up surrounded by war, violence, displacement, oppression, and loss, and Ukrainian children forced from their homes—due to Russia’s full scale invasion—are living this reality now. These aren’t just statistics. They are young lives shaped by loss, anxiety, and grief no child should ever have to endure, made harder still by the disruption of displacement.
Many adults and children struggle to express their emotions, and simple discussion often fails to engage them in meaningful healing.
But there is hope.
Health professionals have been using live action role-playing and tabletop games and are seeing remarkably improved resilience in record time. There have been multiple findings that children who once sat silent and withdrawn now run eagerly to their parents, excited to share their experiences. Another finding described how weeks of these role-playing games have achieved results that would have taken years with traditional services.
GRIT — Games for Resilience and Interactive Transformation — harnesses this powerful approach to support Ukrainian migrants, and displaced children, and their families, helping them process their loss and build their capacity for recovering both personally and economically.
The Reality of War and Displacement
Conflict and displacement leave deep scars on individuals and communities—scars that are often invisible. The numbers speak to a collective loss that affects not just children, but adults too, and that loss doesn’t end when a family crosses a border.
CHILDREN
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
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.
Millions of these families have fled their homes as refugees or migrants, carrying this loss into displacement, often with limited access to culturally grounded resilience support. Parents are trying to build a life in a new country while carrying concern for the one they left. Children and teenagers are learning how to belong again while the adults around them are still trying to catch their breath after so much upheaval.
Learn more in our UN Policy Brief on how transformative games advance recovery and global development.
What is GRIT?
GRIT is a pioneering live-action role-playing game system with restorative and cognitive benefits, designed to help all ages heal from the invisible wounds of displacement and loss. This innovative program is being developed by a global collaboration with people from USA, Norway, Canada, Palestine, Jordan, Iran, Mongolia, Japan, Jamaica, Ukraine, Greece, Georgia, Pakistan, Sweden, Mauritius, Venezuela, First Nations Arawak and Tlingit, and more.
Live-action role-play, often called larp, is a form of collaborative storytelling. There’s no stage or audience: a trained facilitator introduces a situation, and participants decide how their characters respond, whether that’s solving a problem together, negotiating a disagreement, or deciding what kind of leader they want to become. The story creates a little distance from a participant’s everyday experience, making it easier to explore courage, fear, trust, grief, or hope through a character. But the choices, and the lessons, still belong to the participant.
Every session ends with a facilitated debrief, where participants step out of character and talk through what happened, how they made decisions, and what they might carry forward. The experience is human-led, collaborative, and screen-free.
This solution is ideal for cultures where therapy carries a stigma, because the process is game based and collaborative. But the restorative and cognitive results still apply.
Our objective for the pilot is twofold: help Ukrainian refugees and migrants process and work through their displacement, and through this, impact their capacity to rebuild their lives and futures. By improving people’s ability to work with their experience, they can successfully carry out the personal and economic recovery efforts that resettlement and rebuilding require, 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 restorative support for survivors.
Funds can pour into post-crisis affected areas but if the population suffers from loss and displacement, their ability to build capacity and manage those funds is severely limited. In fact, their ability to even learn new concepts can be profoundly hampered. 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.
The Ukraine Pilot Plan
Our first pilot will prepare Ukrainian facilitators to lead a 12-week program for Ukrainian young people living in Poland. Here’s how it comes together:
- Adapt the program with Ukrainian cultural advisors, who co-create the stories, provide the language, and consult on safety practices, ensuring the experience reflects Ukrainian identity, values, and lived realities.
- Recruit and prepare Ukrainian facilitators, trained in the GRIT framework, trauma-informed facilitation, safety and consent, and group management. The first cohort will be bilingual in Ukrainian and English.
- Establish safety and professional support, with Ukrainian mental health professionals guiding screening, referral procedures, and ongoing access to program leaders throughout the pilot.
- Run 12 weekly sessions, each combining a collaborative adventure with a structured debrief, adjusted along the way based on what facilitators and participants learn.
- Document what we learn, gathering anonymized feedback to guide improvements and help future funders understand what responsible expansion would require.
A Global Collaboration for Change
GRIT is built through a consortium of organizations and experts. Cultura Connector is a U.S.-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and this pilot is shaped by partnerships including:
✔ Europe4Youth – E4Y (Poland), a youth organization with strong ties to displaced Ukrainian communities in Poland
✔ YouthUp (Ukraine), a Ukrainian youth organization with deep expertise in non-formal education and game-based learning
✔ Ukrainian 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. Collectively, our advisors bring professional experience with or within:
✔ Sesame Street
✔ Harvard Graduate School of Education
✔ Disney
✔ LEGO
✔ Accenture
✔ Discord
✔ Uppsala University
In 2025, Cultura Connector founder and Executive Director Meghan Gardner was invited as a guest speaker at the 80th United Nations General Assembly, where she addressed the use of games as a mental health intervention. The GRIT team has also been in discussion with World Bank representatives about the potential of culturally grounded, community-led resilience programs, whose guidance has been clear: complete the pilot, document the results, and return with evidence that can be reviewed.
For the Ukraine pilot, Ukrainian cultural advisors, facilitators, and mental health professionals will have the final say in how stories are adapted, how safety practices are applied, and how the program is delivered.
The program is designed to be adapted and adjusted over time to address not just resilience, but also to support education, capacity building, and economic recovery, by strengthening people’s personal capacity so they can carry out resettlement and rebuilding strategies for success.
Want to Help Shape GRIT?
If you’re a cultural advisor or educator with deep ties to Ukrainian communities, we’d love to work with you. Join our network to be considered as a Cultural Advisor for our clients and events, 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 launch of GRIT’s pilot for Ukrainian migrants and displaced young people, giving them access to a safe, engaging, and effective resilience and mental health programming. Unlike traditional discussion-based support, transformative game design integrates role-playing with professional guidance, offering a creative and emotionally secure way to process a range of emotions from loss to anxiety around starting over.
Evidence Driven
Traditional programs often struggle to engage children (and adults). However, play-based programs, specifically role-playing games, have shown 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. To ensure the program’s effectiveness, a neutral third party will conduct studies measuring efficacy.
Building Peace – Internally and Externally
By helping participants process in a safe, creative space, we are giving them the opportunity to heal, regain a sense of normalcy, and rebuild their sense of self, giving them more capacity to rebuild their communities and economy, wherever they’ve landed. By investing in the recovery of displaced Ukrainians today, we are fostering stability, security, and lasting peace.
How the $50,000 Goal Works
A $20,000 anonymous matching gift is already secured. Once the community raises the first $20,000, that match is released, bringing the campaign to $40,000. From there, just $10,000 more fully funds the first three-month GRIT pilot for displaced Ukrainian children living in Poland.
The $50,000 budget covers cultural adaptation and translation, facilitator recruitment and training, safety consultation, participant screening, in-person program delivery, and documentation and reporting.
What Happens If We Keep Going?
The first $50,000 funds a complete three-month pilot. Greater momentum extends the work: $70,000 supports six months of programming, $120,000 funds a complete first year, and $150,000 would support a proposed university research partnership to build a stronger evidence base. Each goal builds on the work made possible by the one before it.
This Pilot Is the Beginning of a Larger Movement
GRIT is being built around a simple idea: communities should have the tools and training to create their own culturally meaningful paths toward resilience. A global framework provides safety practices, facilitator training, and shared structure. Local people provide the language, stories, relationships, and cultural knowledge that give the program meaning.
A successful Ukraine pilot will help us build the training, documentation, safety systems, and evidence needed to bring GRIT to other communities affected by war, displacement, climate disasters, and collective loss. That movement begins with one well-supported pilot.
Your Role in This Mission
Whether you fund the pilot, a training round, or the full initiative, your contribution directly enables recovery, resilience, and hope for Ukrainian families rebuilding their lives. You can also help by sharing the campaign, starting a peer-to-peer fundraising page, or connecting us with Ukrainian cultural advisors or mental health professionals.
Join us in sowing seeds of peace through play. Your partnership brings lasting change to those affected by war and displacement, across generations.
Reach out today to find out how you or your organization can make a lasting impact, or
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.