Playworks wins $100K grant from Packard Foundation

Playworks was announced last week as one of the six winners of Building Vibrant Communities: Activating Empathy to Create Social Change. This Northern California competition, held by Ashoka Changemakers and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, searched for local initiatives that cultivated empathy skills to strengthen communities and motivate young people to become leaders of change. Each winner received a $100,000 prize.

Playworks, which is in its second year in the BBF program, is a nonprofit organization that, through playtime activities organized by recess coaches, strives to create school or youth group playgrounds into positive environments for students to practice leadership and teamwork. It plans to use the grant to expand its program to more schools in Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties and to train other schools that are interested in implementing the same model in their own playgrounds.

Other winners included San Jose State University’s Collaborative for Reaching and Teaching the Whole Child, Soul Shoppe, The First Tee of Monterey County, The Respect Institute, and Rising International.

Read more about the competition in the August 11 post “In the Bay Area, Entities in Each Sector Are Incubating Positive Social Change” by Katherine Murtha.