Play At The Core

Jared is a board-certified social worker and youth development specialist, whose work spans the non-profit, education, and mental health fields over the past 15 years. With a focus on programs for children impacted by trauma, Jared’s mission is to grow a community of program leaders and practitioners as they develop the tools needed to enhance programming for their youth.

Jared began his career in youth development at the Hole In The Wall Gang Camp, a world-renowned therapeutic recreation organization for children affected by serious illness. There, he lead residential and hospital programming before developing a series of new initiatives in Latin America. Before founding Play At The Core (PATC), he served as US Program Director for Right To Play. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in History from Boston College and was named an Adaptive Leadership Fellow while receiving a Master’s Degree in Social Work from New York University.

Play At the Core was designed to support youth development organizations create the change they seek to see from the inside. As practitioners ourselves, we’ve experienced the challenges of bringing outside intervention models to “fix” problems within an organization. The truth is, most organizations don’t need another external tool to implement. What they need is someone to listen to their story, speak in their language, and help them create their vision for success on their own terms.

Our services do just that, and use youth development methods to meet youth development challenges. We use play to unpack a community’s history and engage in a strategic planning process. We create trainings that are guided by a community’s wants and needs, we help practitioners create their vision for success through coaching, and we support the community as they create resources and continuous improvement plans that fortify their work with youth. 

There is a significant body of evidence that has been amassed to explore the frequency and pernicious impacts of childhood trauma. The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) study published by the Center for Disease Control in partnership with Kaiser Permanente, framed trauma as a pervasive and largely ignored public health issue (Felitti, et al., 1998). 

In the years since this studies’ release, little has changed at a systemic level to engage with this challenge. While promising approaches to programming and trauma-sensitive frameworks have been developed, they have remained siloed and predominately clinical in orientation. There interventions prioritize awareness-raising and individual skill-building, over community engagement through a systemic lens.

Among the systemic barriers preventing progress on this issue are:

• High turnover among youth development practitioners. Raikes (1993), explained that frequent turnover among early childhood educators prevented children from developing a secure attachment with teachers. In addition, high turnover negatively affects children's social, emotional, and language development (Korjenevitch & Dunifon, 2010). 
• Mis-alignment between organizational mission and the values. Young people are often not active architects in the development or implementation of the programming that directly serves them. Yet, many organizations talk about the importance of student agency.

Play At The Core is a consulting model that leverages best practices in youth programming to strengthen the systems and practices of the youth development professionals. 

We partner with a broad range of organizations, serving youth from early childhood through adolescence, by putting play at the core of everything we do. We use play to build relationships, communicate ideas, explore challenges, unlock capacity for change, and help children thrive.

Our services are designed to engage organizational leaders, practitioners, and caregivers, and include:

• experiential learning seminars, 
• hands-on mentorship and coaching, 
• collaborative resource creation, 
• program assessments, and 
• strategic program planning 

The benefits of our work are designed for systemic impact and are operationalized at three levels:

Organizational: Our work is tailored to promote greater organizational alignment between mission and operations, saving precious resources and creating more sustainable program quality.

Workforce: Through our responsive approach, practitioners feel more valued and connected to each other; more creative in their work with youth; and more inspired by their own power to make change. This translates to less workforce turnover and stronger program culture.

Youth: Our greatest impact is the change our partners see in their youth: improved developmental, social, and academic outcomes.

The vast majority of our organizational partners serve youth in communities of color throughout the five boroughs of New York. From start to finish, our  partnership approach is unique and tailored to meet the needs of our partners' organizational communities. 

This work begins during our asset mapping and needs assessment process, where we listen to learn partner’s stories and priorities. It continues as we tailor services to meet expressed needs. It is reinforced as we promote exploration during workshops and coaching. And it is sustained as we learn from partners, and leverage strengths to catalyze lasting change.

By building connections and being responsive to practitioner needs, we mirror the same trauma-informed approaches that guide great youth work. As a result, practitioners feel more valued, supported, and connected to each other; more capable and innovative in their work with youth; and more inspired by their own power to make change. This translates to less workforce turnover and stronger program culture.

As Play At The Core prioritizes supportive relationships and an empowered approach to development, our greatest impact becomes the change our partners see in their youth. Our work results in improved developmental, social, and academic outcomes for the children they serve.

The impacts of adversity are transformative in every life. We know that trauma impacts the development of the brain, directly affecting how we interact with the world. Whether we emerge resilient or harmed by adversity depends on a variety of factors, but we can all agree that support from places and people around us matter deeply. By working directly with leaders, practitioners, and caregivers to build stronger programs and relationships with their youth, especially in communities with a high prevalence of trauma, Play At The Core ensures that more children have access to quality supports that allow them to thrive.

In the fall of 2012, Play At The Core was launched in New York City as a program initiative of the global humanitarian organization, Right To Play. Through foundational partnerships with the New York City Department of Education and the Administration for Children’s Services, Play At The Core originally offered training and technical assistance aimed at improving teaching practices through play.

Our initial work was incredibly top-down in its approach, and offered little space for collaboration, customization, or creativity -- essential ingredients in any high quality youth program. 

It wasn't until beginning social work school, that Play At The Core truly began to evolve. While working full-time as the Program Director and studying part-time at NYU, with the guidance of my academic advisor and mentor Dr. Linda Lausell Bryant, Play At The Core became a laboratory for youth development's intersection with community social work. Over the course of five years, Play At The Core's committed team forged an innovative, research-based consulting model, that started to catalyze dramatic program quality gains among some of New York’s most under-supported youth programs. In 2017, Play At The Core became an independent youth development consulting organization.

My desire to work with youth impacted by trauma is a personal one. I am a survivor of early childhood trauma. The abuse I endured was perpetrated by the very individuals who ran the first child development program I was enrolled in. 

Not a day has gone by in the thirty years that have elapsed that I am not revisited by the deep pain of these experiences. This pain has fueled tireless drive to create programs that can support children who have experienced painful challenges and adversity to recognize their own capacity to lead and affect change for themselves and their communities.

My ultimate dream for Play At The Core is to build a shared vision for youth programs across the United States and the world that both engage and strengthen communities they're a part of, creating more intentional and nurturing systems that will reduce and prevent trauma from occurring in the future.

As a board-certified social worker and youth development specialist, with work spanning the non-profit, education, and mental health fields over the past 15 years, I have amassed significant experience in direct practice, program administration, strategic planning, fundraising, and training in program leadership, development, and implementation. With a focus on programs that serve children impacted by trauma, my mission is to grow a community of change that engages program practitioners, leaders, and youth themselves to overcome the challenges they face.

Similarly, Play At The Core's team of youth development consultants possess extensive experience in program development and leadership, our associates draw expertise from their work across the youth program landscape: from early childhood development through college-readiness; sports-based youth development to after school programming; therapeutic recreation to clinical treatment and counseling. Diverse backgrounds in social work, public health, education, and the arts, allow our consultants to bring a blend of innovation, curiosity, and play to our work with partners — inspiring both connection and impact.

Having operated for nearly 10 years and successfully navigating a spin-off from another organization, Play At The Core has proven the value of its work. To date, Play At The Core has partnered with more than 50 different youth development organizations and 500 practitioners and program leaders, impacting over 10,000 children.

As we approached the end of our 5th year of operation with our program model stronger than ever, the limited organizational support we received to fundraise for our work resulted in an unfortunate, but seemingly inevitable, budget deficit. With Right To Play facing a global fundraising shortfall that would impact their programming around the world, their decision was obvious: Play At The Core could continue to operate as long as there is funding coming through the door to support it. At that point, we had only one fee-for-service partner. This gave us a 3-month window to establish ourselves legally and negotiate a transfer of intellectual assets that would let us keep what we had built within Play At The Core and continue our work with existing partners. 

To avoid finding ourselves in a situation like this again, we quickly decided to found ourselves as a for-profit Limited Liability Corporation, and sought to build all future partnerships on a fee-for-service model. The first year of our independence was a terrific challenges that required us to quickly develop business systems to strengthen and sustain our work. Nearly three years later, we now struggle to meet the increasing demand for our services. 

In our final years with the organization, Play At The Core's program values and collaborative approach found itself increasingly at odds with Right To Play. This emerging value conflict was a frequent focus of discussions with with my mentor, Dr. Lausell Bryant. Sensing the odds I was up against, and believing in the vision for Play At The Core, Dr. Lausell Bryant recommended me for a new Adaptive Leadership Fellowship that had been launched at NYU's Silver School of Social Work. 

As a Fellow, I had the chance to work with other young social workers who were engaging similarly complex challenges through their work, and develop a toolkit of approaches to help sustain my efforts and ultimately realize the change I was seeking. The community and approaches I gained fueled Play At The Core's spin-off and our continued pursuit of our vision for change in the youth development landscape. 

The Adaptive Leadership Network that grew out of the fellowship is now one of Play At The Core's partners. Through this work, we are facilitating new program opportunities that build the leadership skills of network members to sustain their engagement with critical social justice challenges in their work.

In the last year, we worked with a number of different partners, providing services to their leaders, practitioners, caregivers, and youth. These organizations include: 

• Playworks New York/New Jersey
• New York University's Silver School of Social Work
• Early Life at Lutheran Social Services of New York
• Office of Early Childhood at the Catholic Schools within the Archdiocese of New York
• Doc Wayne Youth Services
• Research Foundation at the City University of New York (CUNY)
• Cardinal McCloskey Community Services
• Children's Aid
• YMCA of New York
• Ross Initiative in Sports for Equality (RISE)
• Partnership for After School Education (PASE)