Edmond Town Hall’s “Newtown Talks: Conversations on Culture, Society, and Change” speaker series will continue next week with clinical social worker Steve Gross, who will discuss the importance of rich, playful experiences and the lasting ways they can elevate a person’s life.

The event is planned for Thursday, May 8, at 7 pm, Edmond Town Hall, 45 Main Street. Like the other programs in the “Newtown Talks” series, this conversation will be moderated by Suzy DeYoung and Lee Shull.

General admission is $28, while VIP seating and “skip the line” meet and greet is $43. Tickets can be purchased in person at Edmond Town Hall or online at edmondtownhall.org.

The Life is Good Playmaker Project is a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping kids heal from childhood trauma.

Gross, who is the founder of The Playmaker Project, said the organization was “really the first thing that I ever did.” In 1995, he had just graduated from college and was looking to do something that would make the world a better place. Gross started to look at what he called one of the biggest problems in Boston at the time: homelessness.

When wondering how he could help, Gross landed on the idea of buying a van and driving around the city to offer people who are homeless clothes and to take them to shelters if needed. Gross said someone asked him, “Well, why would you be good at that? What is your distinct competence?”

“As a then 22-year-old guy, I was like, ‘I don’t know what my distinct competence is,’” Gross explained. “And then as I thought about it, I realized I was really good with kids.”

Gross had previous experience working with and coaching kids through his work as a camp counselor. At the same time, he realized the fastest growing demographic in homelessness were young children below the age of five. He also learned there’s more to being homeless than just not having a house, that there’s a deeply emotional impact for a young child to grow up amidst uncertainty and poverty.

“So I decided that I was going to tackle that problem from my area of competency, and that was playing with children in a way that helped them feel safe, powerful, loved, and joyful” Gross said.

Growth And Joy

From there, Gross said he started a little nonprofit called Project Joy, which ran therapeutic play groups for homeless and impoverished kids. He had friends who started their own T-shirt company called Jacob’s Gallery, and they would always help out Project Joy for fundraisers and sports tournaments by making T-shirts. When that company later became Life is Good, Gross said they reached out and said they wanted to do more to help Project Joy because they were in the same business.

Confused, Gross asked how they could be in the same business when he does therapeutic play with homeless kids while they make T-shirts. Life is Good Co-Founder Bert Jacobs told Gross, “Nah, we’re both in the spreading the power of optimism business. We do it by creating artwork and selling T-shirts, you do it by helping kids, but we have the same why.”

“We had the same kind of approach to caring for people, and that was the beginning of our partnership and collaboration, which became the Life is Good Playmaker Project,” Gross said.

Technically and legally speaking, the organization is two separate entities, but Gross said they work together and share a common mission: to spread the power of optimism and support the emotional health of people. The Playmaker Project portion of the organization, Gross said, is particularly committed to supporting the social and emotional well-being of kids whose lives have been impacted by trauma.

When he thinks about their work, Gross said they want to help people lead an empowered, fulfilled, and joyful life. This is easier for some people than others because they have access to lots of resources, supports, and healthy relationships. In that sense, Gross said their focus is looking at kids growing up amidst poverty, violence, illness, abuse, neglect, household dysfunction; all of these kinds of adversities that can overwhelm young children.

“If you think of the work we do with kids as medicine, there’s not a kid in the world who wouldn’t benefit from it,” Gross explained. “But when you have kids who have had a lot of trauma in their lives, it can be harder for them to play joyfully with other people. We want to make sure those children who are deprived of those opportunities get them, too.”

Ripple Effect

Gross realized over time through his work that playing with kids for an hour a week was inadequate, and that kids need way more than an hour of joyful, loving, empowering play. This led the organization to step up and focus on providing support and resources to the adults that were with those kids all the time. By empowering the community to do the work with their kids and not rely exclusively on an organization, Gross said parents could create those joyful, safe, and loving experiences with their kids.

In that sense, Gross said his goal for the “Newtown Talks” event is to teach adults how to have fun and live with more joy and passion. He noted that fun can seem trite and trivial to some people, but to him, fun is about being “fully and joyfully alive.”

“And so as adults, the more we feel alive, the more we can spread that energy around us,” Gross explained.

He continued by saying that while anger and trauma are contagious, so is love and joy. If parents want to spread that energy to their kids, Gross said they have to have it themselves.

According to Gross, his dad would end his talks by saying he hopes his loved ones “die young as late in life as possible.” Gross thought that sentiment was beautiful, and it inspired him to teach others how to overcome the stress and cynicism of adulthood and maintain that childlike passion for life.

“I think sometimes adults stop playing. We stop exploring. We stop having that same child-like hunger for fun and wonder and joy. And when we do that, we really stop fully living,” Gross said.

However, he emphasized that there’s no one-size-fits-all method for everyone. Encouraging everyone to go out and do something random like jumping rope is not what fun is about, according to Gross. Instead, he said people need to find and figure out what their own ‘fun plan’ is; what they can do for themselves to evoke a sense of feeling alive and connected to the word around them.

“My idea of a total success would be that everyone who came enjoyed their time there, that they actually had fun, met great people, and took away some ideas that were inspirational and helped them lead a more joyful life,” Gross said.

To Gross, there is no better feeling than helping people find the things they can do everyday to make life a little more fun. He hopes to expand the conversation of mental health beyond Mental Health Awareness Month, which is celebrated in May, to encourage people to have fun and play unabashedly.

“Everybody’s gonna face adversity in their life; some more than others. And the most important thing that helps us overcome adversity is to be loved and connected with other people,” Gross said. “Play, in my opinion, is that universal, loving connector.”

To learn more about The Playmaker Project, visit lifeisgood.com/pages/playmaker-project.

Reporter Jenna Visca can be reached at jenna@thebee.com.