Help Heal the Wounds of War
Photos (Gaza) by Hosny Salah (Ukraine) by UNICEF
Nearly 1 in 5 children around the world—over 473 million—are growing up surrounded by war, violence, and loss. These aren’t just statistics. They are young lives shaped by trauma, fear, and grief no child should ever have to endure. Today, Gaza and Ukraine are among the most dangerous places on Earth to be a child.
Many struggle to express their emotions, and traditional therapy often fails to engage them in meaningful healing.
But there is hope.
Therapists using role-playing 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 There have been multiple findings that children who once sat silent and withdrawn after therapy now run eagerly to their parents, excited to share their experiences.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.
The Reality for Children of War
Children living in conflict zones endure unimaginable hardships that profoundly impact their mental and physical well-being. In regions like Gaza and Ukraine, the statistics reveal a harrowing reality:
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
What is GRIT?
GRIT is a pioneering therapeutic live-action role-playing (LARP) program designed to help all ages heal from the invisible wounds of war. This innovative program is being developed by a global collaboration with people from USA, Norway, Canada, Palestine, Jordan, Ukraine, Greece, Georgia, Pakistan, Sweden, and Mauritius.
Through interactive role-playing, 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.
Our objective is twofold: Help survivors of war process and work through their trauma, and through this, impact their capacity to rebuild their 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 displaced and war-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 affected by war.
Funds can pour into a war affected area but if the population suffers from trauma, their ability to build capacity and manage those funds is severely limited. 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, including:
✔ Alsaid Foundation (Jordan)
✔ Bait Byout (Palestine)
✔ Cultural Advisors (Ukraine)
✔ Guardian Adventures (USA)
✔ Evocative Games (Sweden)
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 Foundation
✔ 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 war-affected regions.
The program is designed to be adapted and adjusted over time to address not just trauma, but also to support 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.
Why Fund this Initiative?
Direct Impact
Your funding directly supports the development and operation of this innovative program, giving people of all ages in Gaza and Ukraine 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
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 an initial fundraising goal of $1.5M, we will be able to fully adapt the program to the culture of 3 locations with the guidance of therapists and facilitators from that culture. Then, our team travels to each location to conduct an intensive two-week training program for local staff who will then administer the program in Gaza, Ukraine and beyond providing 6,000 children and caregivers with support. The funding provides all expenses for the facilitators and therapists in each culture and location of the initiative for 1 year as well as a full study conducted by either Harvard or NYU to test for efficacy of our program against a control group of standard group therapy. If efficacy is proven, the we will then seek funding to reach 50 more post-crisis locations within 3 years reaching more than 300,000 people in need of mental health.
Whether you can fund part of the amount or full, you are helping a child reclaim their future.
Join us in sowing seeds of peace through play. Your generosity brings hope and healing to children affected by war.
Contact Us today and be part of this life-changing mission.
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.
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