ANNOUNCING:  A New Collaboration between Little Uprisings & The Gottabees!



Play for Change, led by Tanya Nixon-Silberg (Little Uprisings) & Bonnie Duncan (The Gottabees), will be an immersive theatrical experience for families featuring puppetry, live music and art-making to talk about power, joy and liberation.

Using play and joy, Tanya and Bonnie bring their expertise as educators for racial justice and theater makers for young audiences to empower youth to imagine themselves as change makers,
to practice being change makers, and to ultimately be the change makers. 
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Play for Change is 2021 LAB (Live Arts Boston) grant recipient!

​“We want to cultivate young people who, across the course of their lifetimes,
will disrupt, disquiet or unhinge oppression.”  - Dr. Gholdy Muhammad 


​Social science research has shown us for decades that young children notice racial differences at very young ages and learn societal rules about race throughout childhood (Hughes et al., 2006). COVID-19 and recent national attention to racial violence has upended much of our practices in the classroom and how we relate to our community as families. With the onset of distance learning and social distancing, educators and parents alike are feeling the need to address injustice in the classroom and in their communities, in a way that is child appropriate and non-didactic. Many teachers and caregivers are asking how to translate already learned practices and engagement into action.

We need spaces in which children can imagine themselves within this moment. 

One tried and true way to engage youth about the world is through play. As beloved educator and visionary Fred Rogers said, “play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children, play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.”

Play for Change Programming Available Summer 2021:


​The Best Day Ever
40-minute ZOOM experience for children and their caretakers

Everyone deserves to have The Best Day Ever.  When it is clear that The Book of Rules has unfair standards for this, we must mobilize to get the rules changed.  Using movement, objects, and lots of imagination, we will show the author of The Book of Rules that we know how to Play for Change!
Tanya and Bonnie helped students understand that it is our job to make sure that other people’s joy isn’t taken away and we can do that by using our own joy to stand up for them so that the rules are fair for everyone.
—Bethania Paris, kindergarten teacher

About Little Uprisings

Little Uprisings (LU) is a collaborative and liberative racial justice program for kids.  Little Uprisings endeavors to:

  • Build long lasting, sustainable, and deep relationships with schools and educators that result in deeply rooted change within institutions.
  • Create programming that centers itself in joy and play - and inspires, educates, and revolutionizes our youth.
  • Affirm our children of color, and make accomplices out of our white children. 
  • Partner with community spaces and existing organizations to bring racial justice work to their forefront.

Little Uprisings’ unlimited, creative approach, seeks to partner with institutions in ways that change long after the first few meetings are held, making racial justice a part of their institutional fabric.  
Little Uprisings is founded by Tanya Nixon-Silberg, who is a black mother, Artist, educator, facilitator. You’d mostly find Tanya playing, radicalizing and learning from her 7 year old, dreaming up new and fun ways to engage children in racial justice and radically imaging how we all get free. 


​This project has grown out of our shared love of building community through art and action; our deep respect and trust of children's perspectives and voices; and our friendship as mothers, artists, and educators.  We can't wait to share this work with you as it develops! 
- Bonnie & Tanya
Interested in bringing Play for Change to your community?
all photos by Tess Scheflan