What if we played our way toward a more flourishing world?

The Nonprofit Play Book is an invitation to explore the possibilities of play, imagination, and delight in nonprofit work. Through reflection questions, fun activities like paper dolls, crossword puzzles, and coloring pages, and more, this book will help you:

You’re working toward a world where all people can flourish.

You deserve to embody that world now

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What might change if our organizations made room for everyone’s humanity, including our own?

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When curiosity feels indulgent, rest feels irresponsible, and every experiment needs a guaranteed outcome, something outside of us is shaping what we believe is possible, and it’s limiting our capacity to create real change.

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Making room for play invites us to examine those conditions. Who gets to choose? What are we rewarding? What have we accepted as necessary that we might organize differently?

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Play creates space to imagine and practice something different.

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When we play, we develop the capacities we need for collective change.

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Play gives us ways to rehearse different relationships with power, uncertainty, and one another. A small experiment might help us notice a bigger possibility. A shared laugh might open a conversation. An imaginary nonprofit floor plan might reveal whose needs our actual workplace overlooks.

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And sometimes, play gives us a lovely afternoon. That matters, too.

Play is part of being human—and making room for our full humanity helps us create a more flourishing world together.

💛 We deserve to inhabit the world we’re trying to create. Care, dignity, joy, and belonging help us embody the world we dream is possible.

💛 The nonprofit play deficit is systemic. Scarcity, unequal power, overwork, and pressure to prove our worth crowd out play. Making room for it means questioning and changing our work cultures and conditions.

💛 Play helps us imagine beyond what we’ve inherited. It gives us space to question assumptions, explore other possibilities, and envision organizations that operate differently.

💛 Play can deepen our capacity for collective change. Curiosity, experimentation, connection, and learning help us move from imagining possibilities to acting on them together.

💛 How we work is connected to the changes we are working toward. Our everyday relationships, decisions, and practices should reflect the equity and care our organizations promise.

💛 Joy and pleasure have value in themselves. We don’t have to justify every playful moment by proving that it makes us more productive.

Hi, I'm Jessica. I work really hard, but I play hard too.

I’m Jessica Aviva, founder of The Fruition Coalition, a writer, educator, and researcher with a Ph.D. in Organizational Leadership and more than 25 years of experience working in and alongside nonprofits.

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My work explores leadership, solidarity, and the conditions that help people and communities flourish. I’m interested in how power shapes our organizations, how we care for one another, and how imagination can help us conceptualize and create possibilities.

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I made this book to collaboratively play with those questions as I lead the movement to restore humanity, generosity, love, and joy to the nonprofit sector.

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We can take the work seriously without being serious all the time.

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Let’s make room for possibility.

Get your free copy of The Nonprofit Play Book

You’ll also receive writing, resources, and invitations to explore more caring, imaginative, and liberating ways of living, leading, and working—and get 10% off any Fruition Coalition membership for as long as you are a member!