Together with our friends at Young Futures, and with support from Niantic, Pivotal and Susan Crown Exchange, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center is thrilled to announce the Here Comes the Fun cohort, a group of eight nonprofits and university labs working alongside students to design and scale digital play experiences that actively support the wellbeing of pre-teens and teens.
From video games to creative coding, digital play fosters creativity, connection, and emotional resilience—yet too few solutions prioritize youth wellbeing. This challenge seeks to change that by funding innovative, youth-centered solutions that:
- Align with the Responsible Innovation in Technology for Children (RITEC) research-backed well-being outcomes (safety, autonomy, relationships, and more)
- Embrace the Four Freedoms of Play: freedom to fail, experiment, embody identity, and engage with effort
- Are co-created with teens to meet their developmental needs
Grantees have joined the Young Futures Academy, a five-month program to scale their impact.
Learn more about the Here Comes the Fun cohort here.
The Work In Action: Eight Projects and the YF Innovators Leading Them…
- Boys & Girls Clubs of Southeastern Michigan (Detroit, MI) – Alise Dixon, Chief Program Officer, is launching GameSafe, a youth-designed program that empowers young people to create safer, more inclusive gaming communities through initiatives like a peer-led pledge, trainings, and a youth-managed Twitch channel.
- CodeSpeak Labs (Orange County, CA / New York City, NY) – Jen Chiou, Founder, is expanding Quest Craft, a digital role-playing game where youth work together through culturally diverse adventures that spark imagination, build social connection, and grow skills for navigating life’s quests.
- Learning Economy Foundation (London, UK) – Amanda Slavin, Chief Development Officer, is developing a platform that provides children and their teachers or parents with a safe, secure digital tool that tracks meaningful play and offers personalized prompts for shared activities that strengthen learning and connection in games.
- New Jersey Institute of Technology & Drexel University (Newark, NJ / Philadelphia, PA) – Dr. Erin J.K. Truesdell, Assistant Professor, leads Skyscraper Games, which invites youth to learn computational thinking and programming skills by designing and programming games for the world’s largest architectural video game display.
- Next Gen Men (Vancouver, BC) – Jake Stika, Executive Director, is growing the NGM Alliance, an online community where masculine-identifying young people in middle and high school connect, play, and support each other—building friendships and wellbeing through safe, youth-led digital experiences.
- play2PREVENT Lab at Yale School of Medicine (New Haven, CT / Hanover, NH) – Dr. Lynn Fiellin, Founding Director, is co-creating PlaySocial with teens, an interactive digital game that engages teens and their families to tackle the mental health challenges of social media, empowering youth to build resilience and foster healthier online experiences.
- Tech Unlimited (formerly Tech Kids Unlimited) (Brooklyn, NY) – Beth Rosenberg, Founder & Executive Director, is launching Play My Way, a project where neurodiverse teens create short videos explaining why their favorite video games matter to them, highlighting digital play as a source of confidence, identity, and connection for their families and caregivers.
- University of Georgia (Athens, GA) – Kathryn Youngblood, Senior Research Engineer, is developing Debris Tracker Junior, an app that reimagines community science to put youth joy and creativity first through mission-based, character-led games that empower teens to prevent plastic pollution.
