A story · In honor of
The people we teach for.
Every Play Pilgrimage carries three people with it. They are not here to see the laughter they helped start. So we carry them, into every classroom we reach.
Every Play Pilgrimage carries three people with it. They are not here to see the laughter they helped start. So we carry them, into every classroom we reach.
It is easy to talk about play as a method. Games, energizers, the science of a good day. But the reason this work exists is simpler and more human than any method. Three people shaped the man who started it, and shaped what he believes a life is for.
One taught him that joy comes from other people. One taught him to stay positive while serving the kids who needed it most. One taught him that nobody learns a thing they only hear about, they have to live it. Together they are the quiet curriculum behind everything we do. When we travel to a school or an orphanage abroad, they travel with us.
This is for Tom, Alex, and Greg.
Tom loved people, and he was fascinated by them. He could make a stranger feel like the most interesting person in the room.
He taught Jared that our greatest moments of joy come from our relationships with others. That is one of the most important lessons we teach during these Play Pilgrimages, and it is exactly why Tom's spirit lives on through our work. Every circle of laughing kids is a small proof of what he believed.
He taught me the importance of community, and that our greatest moments of joy come from our relationships with others.
Jared served in the Peace Corps with Alex. They both served at orphanages, in places where it would have been easy to let the hard days win.
Alex was one of the most positive people Jared has ever known. The two of them would brainstorm ways to help others be positive too, turning their own optimism into something they could hand to the kids around them. That instinct, to give your good energy away rather than guard it, became part of how we train teachers.
Alex lives on through the work of A Primally Playful Foundation. We teach what he embodied.
He was one of the most positive people I've ever known. We would brainstorm ways to help others be positive.
Greg was a good friend and a professional mentor. He had a simple, stubborn conviction about teaching: do not explain a thing to people. Let them experience it.
He taught Jared to have people experience whatever he is trying to teach. More than anyone, Greg inspired the pedagogy that runs through this entire foundation, the experiential learning that turns a lesson on happiness into a game you remember in your body for the rest of your life. When we run a workshop, Greg is there with us.
He, more than anyone, inspired our pedagogy revolving around experiential learning, and I know he's there with us as we're teaching these workshops.
Community from Tom. Positivity from Alex. Learning by doing from Greg. Put those three together and you have the whole heart of what we carry into every school and orphanage we reach.
Our Play Pilgrimages have taken this work to the Kyrgyz Republic, Costa Rica, Ghana, Mexico, and Guatemala. Each trip trains teachers who carry the happiness program into their classrooms for the rest of their careers.
That is what makes the dedication more than a memory. Every teacher we train becomes another person living out community, positivity, and learning by doing. Tom, Alex, and Greg do not just live on in a sentence on a page. They live on in thousands of kids who will never know their names, but will grow up with what they believed.
Not abstractions. The way three real people moved through the world, now written into how we teach.
The deepest joy is shared joy. We build it on purpose, with play.
Optimism is a gift you hand to others, especially the kids who need it most.
You do not lecture happiness. You let people feel it, and it stays.
You learn more about someone in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.
The best tribute to Tom, Alex, and Greg is another classroom that lives by what they taught. Sponsor a teacher, and their lessons reach a child who needs them.