“To me, I’m fueled to remind people around the world how powerful we are when we come together and find common ground in our humanity and our connectedness.” - Play for Peace Trainer Lauren "Lolo" Evans
At Play for Peace, we’ve watched so many young volunteers grow in leadership with us over the years, and it’s exciting to witness the ways they choose to incorporate Play for Peace into their adult lives. Trainer Lauren “Lolo” Evans, grew up in Naperville, IL, outside of Chicago. She had been involved with many different social organizations in high school and got involved with Play for Peace when her mother met our co-founder Michael Terrien at a conference. Lolo became a youth facilitator and started conducting play sessions, or what we now call Practice Peace Sessions, back in 1999. When Play for Peace was chosen to be the youth branch of the Parliament of the World Religions conference in Cape Town, South Africa that year, Lolo was one of approximately 30 youth facilitators from all over the world who stayed at the University of Cape Town, planning activities for hundreds of communities throughout the area. Lolo said that experience helped shape her life. At the time, she had just turned 16 years old, and she made wonderful friendships with Play for Peace volunteers globally. “I saw the power of play to connect people,” Lolo said. “It affected my life to see the power of play to connect communities.” After that conference, as she was preparing to graduate high school, Lolo started a fundraiser to bring one of the youth facilitators from South Africa to Chicago.
During her time in college at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Lolo started her first collegiate club Play for Peace. Working alongside trainer Laurie Frank and fellow student Lux Hariharan, Play for Peace worked with 20 people at the university, and 10 community organizations to help conduct play sessions. Together, the team hosted play dates on campus, in the library mall. They even brought a team of youth facilitators from their university to Guatemala during Spring Break, where they could learn together with the youth facilitators there.
As a Play for Peace trainer, Lolo has conducted many trainings through the years. After college, she moved to Chicago and worked in the Chicago public schools alongside trainer Richard Rutschman and members of his team. Her involvement with us has certainly been on a global scale. Lolo divided her time between Chicago and South Africa for a few years. Three years ago, she and another volunteer from Cape Town spent two weeks in Kenya launching Play for Peace there with training for 35 young adults. Lolo worked with Rotary International to help introduce Play for Peace to communities in Nigeria and helped facilitate continued work with that organization. She also helped develop a curriculum manual for Play for Peace, to help centralize training resources. Now living in Miami, Florida, Lolo is getting ready to launch a special campaign that we can’t wait to share with our Play for Peace Community. It’s based on the South African word “Ubuntu,” which translates as “I am because we are” or “a person is a person through other people.” Lolo keeps finding ways to weave Play for Peace into her life, wherever she goes.
In her words, “To me, I’m fueled to remind people around the world how powerful we are when we come together and find common ground in our humanity and our connectedness.” We’ll be back next week with more on Lolo’s special campaign that invites us all to turn toward each other and connect, which she believes is the way to begin solving the complex issues we see in our world.
