CHILDSPLAY INTERNATIONAL

Nonprofit Organization

Childsplay International (CPI) is a nonprofit based in New York that helps vulnerable children around the world realize the benefits of play – like learning new skills, becoming socially adept, developing physical strength, and expressing one’s feelings through art and storytelling.

While we are not educators or therapists, we believe that play can be educational and therapeutic. We’ve demonstrated this in hardscrabble refugee camps, remote mountain villages, and in countries disrupted by social strife, poverty, and disease (including HIV/AIDS, which has orphaned so many children in Kenya). In Haiti, Peru, Pakistan, Ghana, India, Kenya, Sri Lanka, and Nepal, we work with local teachers and leaders to promote sustainable, culturally appropriate programs that enhance kids’ lives.

CPI’s track record goes back over a decade. We have been written up in the humanitarian magazine, Living City. We have attracted phenomenal people to our Advisory Board – for example, Mara Krachevsky of Harvard’s Project Zero and Dr. Jean-Elie Gilles, a leading authority on Haitian history and culture who is Jacmel’s representative to UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network. Currently we are working with Dr. Susan Linn, an internationally recognized expert on the theory of play whose books are translated into languages such as Korean and Chinese. Susan is helping us create webinars that will help teachers integrate puppetry into the classroom, enabling kids to use puppets in everyday activities such as show-and-tell.

We share our experience freely, and have made available detailed instructional manuals on how to organize storytelling events and maskmaking workshops. An all-girls school in the Democratic Republic of Congo has incorporated our Storytelling Program into their extracurricular activities.

We partner with complementary organizations, such as Malaika and Lift Up the Vulnerable, so that we can reach an even larger constituency and extend our resources.

We identify local experts, and work with them intensively. The latest example is in Haiti, where we are establishing a sustainable mask-making workshop under the direction of Dider Civil, a renowned professional mask-maker. For the first time, girls will be included in top-tier mask- making instruction, and all the kids will learn a culturally relevant skill that could lead to permanent employment. In a troubled place like Haiti, these are major accomplishments. If all goes as planned, Didier will help us bring these workshops to countries in Africa, where mask-making is also part of traditional culture. One important effect of our work, apart from directly helping kids, is that we help to preserve local cultures from encroaching, digital homogeneity.