Peace Through Play: Building Trust, Healing, and Resilience with Sarah Gough

Peace Through Play: Building Trust, Healing, and Resilience with Sarah Gough

May 1, 2026 · 58 min

About this episode

Sarah Gough discusses the role of cooperative play in peacebuilding and community resilience.

In this conversation, Sarah Gough, Executive Director of Play for Peace, shares how cooperative play can become a powerful tool for peacebuilding, healing, and community resilience. From her first days in Guatemala to projects across more than 40 countries, Sarah reflects on the role of youth leadership, local wisdom, human connection, and joy in communities affected by conflict, displacement, poverty, and climate crisis. She also explores why peace cannot only be built in conference rooms, but must also begin in playgrounds, circles, and shared moments of trust. Keywords peace, play, peacebuilding, youth leadership, community resilience, conflict transformation, human connection, grassroots leadership, climate crisis, healing, Play for Peace Takeaways -Peacebuilding begins with human connection, not only policy or diplomacy. -Cooperative play creates shared experiences that allow trust to grow. -Young people can become powerful leaders in divided communities. -Local communities must adapt peacebuilding tools to their own culture and wisdom. -Joy, laughter, and compassion can support healing after trauma. -Climate stress and displacement can intensify social conflict. -Resilient…

People in this episode

Host: Meenu Gupta

Guest: Sarah Gough

Topics covered

Keywords

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Play for Peace

Places: Guatemala

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