Playwrite Inc. Using Kickstarter to Bring their Performance Model to Youth in Georgia

PlayWrite is hoping to take a giant, ocean-bounding step towards making their tried-and-true model available to youth everywhere, using the crowd-funding juggernaut, Kickstarter. This campaign will bring five remarkable women from Tbilisi, Georgia to Portland, OR this October to learn how to lead PlayWrite’s life-changing workshops for youth-at-the-edge.　

The country of Georgia has been wracked with violence since declaring independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, and young people are especially vulnerable to its effects. There are few resources to help them cope with their trauma, and PlayWrite wants to change that.　

Bruce Livingston, PlayWrite’s founder and Executive Director, developed a unique and highly successful 10-day playwriting workshop, steeped in recent research advancements in interpersonal neurobiology and experimental psychology. Serving youth-at-the-edge in Portland for over a decade, young playwrights use dramatic narrative to work through their own emotional conflicts toward healing and resolution.

Livingston’s connection to Georgia emerged 2 years ago, but it is rooted in a relationship nearly four decades old. With two degrees in Anthropology, Livingston spent the 1970s teaching in Shiraz, Iran. One of his best students, Manouchehr Shiva, went on to become a Fulbright Scholar in Tbilisi in 2012.

After watching Livingston’s TEDx talk on YouTube in June 2013, Shiva was convinced PlayWrite’s model would be of immense value to Georgian youth, and contacted his mentor, asking about replication. Excited by the possibility of taking PlayWrite, Inc. international, Bruce responded that it would take a team of passionate, smart and sensitive individuals with grit and perseverance to actualize this endeavor.

Using Shiva’s Georgian network, a groundswell of over 240 individuals expressed interest in bringing PlayWrite to the region. After a year of in-depth discussion via email, FaceTime and Skype, it became clear that a the five-member team from the Georgian Centre for the Psychosocial and Medical Rehabilitation of Torture Victims (GCRT) and Social Change Supporters (SCS) is the right fit to replicate PlayWrite’s model.　

Last September, along with Program Director Lyndsay Hogland, Livingston went to Tbilisi to meet the GCRT/SCS team face-to-face and spent two weeks with them. After witnessing their work in Children’s Houses (like group foster homes, in which 10-12 children are in the care of 2-3 adults), Livingston and Hogland were confidant this partnership would be a success.　

“Elene, Tina, Anka, Nato and Sopo are incredibly talented, skilled, and savvy women, devoting their working life to bettering the lives of trauma-exposed young people in Georgia. They function beautifully in American culture as well as their native Georgian culture, and are passionate about the chance to bring PlayWrite to their country.”

This training is an endeavor that reaches beyond PlayWrite’s budget, so Livingston has turned to Kickstarter to raise the $28,789 needed to bring this venture to fruition.　In accordance with Kickstarter guidelines, if the funding goal hasn’t been reached by July 29th, all pledges are cancelled and the project doesn’t move forward. Livingston is hoping to make an international appeal that supporting this project has the capacity to impact countless youth in a huge, life-changing way.

To learn more about this project, visit　tinyurl.com/Playwrite