Our story
From an orphanage to a movement.
How a Peace Corps post in the Kyrgyz Republic, organic farms with no shared language, and one quiet train ride home became a foundation that has reached over 20,000 kids.
How a Peace Corps post in the Kyrgyz Republic, organic farms with no shared language, and one quiet train ride home became a foundation that has reached over 20,000 kids.
Long before there was a foundation, there was a young volunteer in a place far from home, learning that the deepest connection on earth needs no common language. It only needs play.
This is the story of how that lesson, carried across four countries and a decade, became A Primally Playful Foundation.
Jared Hippler joined the Peace Corps and was sent to the Kyrgyz Republic as the director of health and happiness at an orphanage.
There were no perfect lesson plans and no shared first language. What worked was play. Games taught trust faster than any lecture. Movement taught regulation better than any worksheet. The children learned, and so did he. This was play-based experiential teaching, and it changed everything Jared believed about how a young person grows.
It was the first proof of an idea he would spend the next fifteen years building on. You learn more about someone in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.
Between his Peace Corps years, Jared volunteered on organic farms across Southeast Asia, living and working beside people he could not speak a word to.
They bonded anyway, through the shared rhythm of work and the easy joy of play. No translation required. It confirmed what the orphanage had started to show him. Our greatest joys come from other people, not from anything we can buy or scroll.
The conviction that would become a mission, formed long before there was a name for it.
In 2011 Jared returned to the United States. Stepping onto public transit, he noticed something that stopped him cold.
Roughly 60% of the people around him were ignoring one another, faces down in their phones. After years of connection built on play and presence, the silence felt wrong. Something about it felt innately unhealthy, and sad.
That number is closer to 90% today. He could not stop thinking about it. The gap between what he had lived abroad and what he was watching at home became the question that would not leave him alone: how do you remind people that joy lives in each other, not in a screen?
Peace Corps in the Kyrgyz Republic, teaching orphanage kids through play when language could not.
Organic farms where work and play built friendship across every language barrier.
Back in the US, watching most people ignore each other for their phones. The idea took root.
A Primally Playful Foundation is founded to change humanity's trajectory through the power of play.
A Primally Playful Foundation was created to change humanity's trajectory by strengthening community bonds through play, and by training teachers to educate youth about mental health, happiness, the effects of screen entertainment, and the social-emotional skills that equip them for lives of fulfillment, joy, and service.
Everything Jared had learned abroad now had a structure. The orphanage lesson, the farm friendships, the silent train. All of it became a method that could be taught, repeated, and carried into classrooms anywhere.
What started at one orphanage became a series of Play Pilgrimages, bringing play-based learning to kids and teachers far from home.
Costa Rica in 2020. Ghana in 2021. Guatemala. Mexico. Each trip trained local teachers and ran games for children who had never seen happiness taught as a skill.
Together with the work at home, the foundation has now reached over 20,000 kids since 2018.
You learn more about someone in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.
In 2026 the foundation returns to Ghana and Guatemala to train 150 mental health and happiness teachers. Each one will carry the program into their classroom for the rest of their career, reaching 5,000+ kids a year between them. $297 trains one teacher, for a whole classroom.