Our motto: Dream it! Map it! Play it!
The Dream Playbook
How to create the meaning to your life
Have you ever asked yourself: “What good is school?” Or: “Why bother going to work every day?” Well, here is the answer: So you can live the life of your dreams! The Dream Playbook is here to help you create that dream and discover the passion that makes life worth living. When you tap into this passion, suddenly things like school, work and exercise aren’t chores anymore, but the tools to making dreams a reality and building an amazing life. So get ready — with this playbook as your guide, not even the sky is the limit. More info.
If you’re a teacher or facilitator, contact us and we’ll send you a Facilitator’s Guide so you can customize your interactive classes.
We’ve tested The Dream Playbook in about a dozen after-school programs, and had so much success that the facilitators starting calling it The Dream Club or Dream Workshop. The Playbook is designed to be used by individuals without any guidance, but during the group workshops, we learned that kid’s loved to share their dreams and build upon each other’s dreams. We also realized not everyone can do a semester-long, after-school program, so we developed a short 3-hour workshop. This pilot Dream Club is a workshop for kids to learn, practice and share the skills for dreaming. We used the Dream Playbook and Facilitator’s guide to customize the class.
Finally, the Dream Workshop is here to help kids live an amazing life. This was our pilot program, which, depending on how you measure it, took almost a year of brainstorming. It started with some important planning meetings with the Northside Education Committee and local schools, parents and community members. At one meeting Steve Sunderland stood up and said kids don’t know how to dream anymore. At the moment, I was writing the Dream Playbook and suddenly saw an opportunity to make it real with some hands-on activities. So, I teamed up with Sue Wilke head of the Northside Education Committee, Steve Sunderland from Peace Village, Tommy Rueff from Happen Inc. and Shelley Werner and the kids at Faces Without Places. Actually, there were dozens of adults behind the scenes to make this happen, including a generous donation of about 20 pizzas from an anonymous Samaritan.
It is a long story to summarize a year of thinking; so, hopefully, the pictures speak for themselves. Our workshop had 3 stations teaching kids the basics of how to make dreams a reality. Or in my words, how to find the passion and purpose to give their lives meaning. We are challenged to find an adequate way to express this concept. Tommy likes to refer to it as the superpower of creativity and the ability to make it happen! Any way you express it, these ideas of nurturing passion are new to the educational system, which focuses more on traditional skills like reading, writing and arithmetic.
Below are pictures with permission from Faces Without Places (now Upspring). They focus on my workshop because I didn’t have time to photograph anything else. My workshop was called “How’s it going, Scott?” And it focused on teaching kids how to make their dreams a reality. There’s not much you can do in 25 minutes, so my solution was just to present them with a simple exercise to get them thinking that making dreams come true takes some planning and some work. I gave them a drawing of two islands. They were on one island and their hypothetical dream of a treasure chest was on the other island. And in between there was an insurmountable obstacle; in this case, an ocean full of sharks. Their assignment was to draw or write a solution to get the treasure.
Some great solutions included:
- Cutting down the palm tree to make a bridge.
- Making an airplane or wings from the palm leaves.
- Whistling to the dolphins and riding them to the other side.
- Walking on water or the sharks like stepping stones.
I didn’t want to coach or bias them, rather I wanted them to be as creative as possible. So when the kids spontaneously started making step-by-step action plans I was impressed. And another student created multiple backup plans. When the other students learned this the idea spread like fire. Though the treasure was a metaphor, only one student questioned why they actually wanted the treasure. Instead, he made a plan to fulfill his real dream of being a football star.
Red Carpet World Movie Premiere
A few days later this same group of kids went to the “world premiere” of the movie they had been making this summer about the Cincinnati Museum Center. They wrote, filmed and starred in this movie. They even made their own costumes. It was a huge project organized by Happen Inc and their Lights, Camera and Learning in Action program. It was an amazing moment to see the kids walk down the red carpet, signing autographs before their limo ride to Graeter’s Ice Cream. Wow, what a dream come true. I didn’t have anything to do with this event except I was honored to attend. And during the Dream Workshop, the young director of this movie asked, “How long do I have to go college to be a film director?” It was a pivotal moment when the idea of a dream turns into the passion of commitment.
