Playing to Live!

MISSION The mission of Playing to Live! is to build effective and sustainable community-based expressive art programs which target the psychosocial needs of children and communities facing trauma. We partner with local community organizations to create culturally relevant trauma informed psychosocial programming and collaboratively work with community’s to build community run programming. PTL provides support and oversight including monitoring and evaluation to build on the body of research that indicates the need for creative mental health solutions to high trauma situations. VISION Globally there is a severe gap in response to mental health in low-resource, high trauma settings. Playing to live seeks to create a core model to build capacity of essential psychosocial services to address this gap by partnering with community organizations, which in turn builds community skills and capacity. Our goal is to establish a core training and program model, which will be built through an exhaustive review of evidence based practice and PTL implementation. For each culture and community, this core training will follow an adaptation process to be implemented in multiple high trauma low resource settings that can be adapted appropriately to meet the specific needs of that community. Our goal is to create a strong core program that successfully addresses these needs but is adaptable for the targeted community’s culture.