 Hi, everybody. It's Barbara Tint, your AIN president. And I'm delighted to be here with you with a dear friend and colleague, Kathy Saylett, who is a longtime AIN member. And Kathy is here to talk about her new initiative, the Global Play Brigade, which AIN is happy to be endorsing and sharing many, many sentiments and community members with. So, Kathy, welcome. Thank you. Thanks so much, Barb. It's great to see you. It's great to have a chance to say hello to all of the wonderful AIN community. And Barb, thank you for early on joining the Global Play Brigade yourself. And I am so excited that AIN has decided to to march alongside of us and to endorse the work of the brigade. Yeah, so just a little background on what the Global Play Brigade is. Great, great. Okay, so in March of 2020, when it became clear that COVID-19 was turning into a worldwide pandemic, and then an ensuing economic crisis, a global gathering of performance activists from over 40 countries, improvisers, educators, actors, playwrights, musicians, clowns, of course, applied improvisers, therapists and coaches, we began meeting over Zoom to see if we might be able to be of some sort of organized support to help our fellow human beings as we weathered this crisis together. And we were interested in two things. The first thing was we wanted to see if we could come together and make available to people across the globe, the tools of play, improv and performance for everyday life. As we all at the applied improvisation network community believe as along with the Global Play Brigade, we all believe that play and improv and performance are essential for human and community development and for culture change. It's through play that we experience ourselves and others in new and creative ways. Play helps us see and hear each other. Play can create development, creativity and change and it helps us to create possibility. And so we we wanted to offer our services, our expertise for free by work and play shops online and through platforms like Zoom and also WhatsApp to provide a space for playing and for listening and talking and for social connection. So that was one thing that we were interested in doing with the Global Play Brigade. The other thing, Barb, was that as performance activists, we also saw that this crisis represented an opening, a window for the possibility of creating an initiative, a movement that would continue beyond this moment. And we had no interest in going back to normal. Normal is the brutal murder of George Floyd. Normal is inadequate, underfunded and unfairly distributed healthcare. Normal is millions and millions of people who are desperately poor. Normal is partisan politics and corruption and normal is destroying our planet. So the Global Play Brigade is part of this vast and mass, passionate human surge that we are seeing on screens and streets all over the world. To create a new world, we need not only frustration and anger and pain, we also need joy. We need love. We need laughter. We need all of that to create hope and possibility out of our pain. And so we are thrilled. I am thrilled to be building a Global Play movement with all of you. Our slogan is play it forward, change our world. Beautiful. Thank you. Well, we're excited to partner with you on this. And as you know, many of our community members, board members are working with you. From the beginning. Yeah. And many of the people on the Brigade have been working with us. And one of the things that I love about these kinds of affiliations is that we all have different tools. And so you're a grassroots movement that's just springing up. And ironically, that's how AIN started many years ago as a group of people who got together and said, hey, we're all thinking about the same thing, you know, 30 some odd people and look at what we've grown. Now we're an international nonprofit board. We're an organization with, you know, very different ways in to make things happen. And our stated vision and purpose is AIN seeks to use the power and joy of improvisation to create a positive change in diverse and global contexts and communities for deep and lasting global impact. So what you're doing with global Play Brigade is very much in, you know, alignment with our vision. And we co-imagine the many, many ways in which we can work together. And I agree that one of the things we're looking to do at this time is to imagine what has emerged during the pandemic. What is emerging out of this complete explosion of, you know, our consciousness of inequity, which obviously many people have been conscious of for a long time, and others are just waking up. What do we carry with us going forward? And what do we let go of? So these are the questions on the table. And we're excited to join with you in the march forward to the world vision that I think we all share. Yeah, yeah. I love what you say, Barb. I love the applied improvisation network. That's why I was one actually maybe I wasn't in the original 30, but I think it was in the original 37. That just shows how old I am. But I'm so happy to have been on this road with you all. And yeah, I think we've got a real opportunity. Just just what we were talking about that there's an opening. I think that people are seeing some things that have for many, not for all, as you said, but for many were not seeable before. And one of the main things is also that we are all socially connected. And what is improvisation? If not, this incredible gift, this incredible tool that helps us both see and practice our connectedness all at the same time, see, practice and create it. So yeah, so we've got a new website, global play brigade org. We've got a Facebook page that you can join and like, please do so. And we I can't remember if I mentioned this, but you know, these free workshops that we're offering all over the world. And they're going to be in different languages and bilingual and they're going to be on zoom and what's up and they're going to we want to like we don't want to just have people from, you know, the UK in a workshop or the people from or people from Nigeria in a workshop. We want to we want to do a lot of cross country, cross time zone, yeah, fraternizing and playing. So we would love for people to volunteer and join us as Brigadiers leading workshops and also in all the other ways that people can help because we're completely volunteer and our resource is love. Well, I feel you there. We are all volunteers well, except for a small amount of, you know, FTE for for administrative help. And it is hard to do this work with people who are all trying to do it in their extra time. Right. And and one of the other sort of coincidental benefits maybe of this time as some of us have more extra time on our hands because a lot of a lot of the world stopped. So one of the things I've been thinking about and I just had a conversation with someone else about this is that, you know, improvisation is very much about spontaneity. And right now I think what we're trying to merge is that spontaneous energy with real intention. You know, we really want to bring intention to everything we do. So I really appreciate and I'm grateful for the efforts that you're putting forward. I was not one of the original 35 in the Applied Improvisation Network. So grateful to my predecessors for part, you know, paving this path for all of us. And I look forward to seeing what can be created together in the future. And I do know that we are all working together in the same direction. And for that, I'm very grateful. Here's our gesture, Barb. You make a heart and then you send it out to the world. That's the gesture of the global play brigade and AI in, I think, I think inherently it's hours as well at AI in. So now we have to come up with an AI gesture. I don't have one, but maybe we'll just that on the next board meeting. We also have a global board. So we're represented by every continent on our board is very important. And we'll look forward to seeing what what comes of this, Kathy, great work. I've been at some of your meetings and we are really globally very well represented and connected. And that's one of the most important things right now is to reach as many corners of the earth as we can. Thank you, Barb. Thank you, AI in. Thank you, Global Play Brigade. See you soon.