Ayiti was developed in the 2005-2006 program and distributed last year with curriculum materials. It is a professional quality casual game that uses the location of Haiti to educate players about the obstacles to education faced by children in developing countries. In the game, each player assumes the role of family members living in rural Haiti. Over the course of the game, the player must choose among and balance various goals, such as achieving education, making money, staying healthy, and maintaining happiness, while making decisions that contribute to or detract from achieving his or her chosen goals.

Second, the Ayiti game has the potential to educate millions of youth who play it. Once engrossed, a young person playing Ayiti will learn in an experiential way about the global impact of poverty, be directed to resources about it, and learn what they can do to address it through civic engagement. To reach a broad audience, GK has established partnerships with UNICEF, TakingITGlobal, and MTV, all of whom collaborate with GK to distribute the game on their respective websites. Since the game is distributed with educational resources, it can be used in classrooms where teachers can process the subject matter with students.

In addition, GK has established a replicable after school program based on our experiences in P4K. Over the past two years, GK has created and refined a gaming curriculum that enables teachers and youth workers to develop similar programs. We are now working with the United Way of New York City to develop a plan for replicating it in as many as eight schools over the next three years.

As the first youth-created educational game of professional quality, Ayiti has received considerable attention from the press, gaming organizations, and online gamers themselves. Ayiti has been mentioned or featured by New York 1, Voice of America, The Associated Press, Chronicle of Philanthropy, and Marie Claire, among others.

Since it was launched in 2006, the game has received prestigious awards for its achievements, including the “GaCha” Award for Best Awareness Raising Game at the Fourth Annual Games4Change festival and selection as an Adobe Listen Up! outstanding program.

GK’s annual budget is $3,512,746 for FY2008, and our total revenue in FY 2007 was $3,099,650 (unaudited). There are currently 42 full-time staff members who work for GK. GK staff members have built a reputation as leaders in the fields of youth development, international and public policy education, and the use of the Internet to foster dialogue and learning about critical world issues. A team of seven staff members works on the projects of the OLP.

Since then, as GK has developed a range of pioneering online programs, socially conscious games have remained central to our programming. Early on, we noticed the enormous amount of time our participants spent playing games, in effect participating in workshops about child soldiers or ethnic conflict in our programs and returning home to play games defined by killing and violence. We realized that GK not only had an opportunity to leverage what was becoming one of the most dominant forms of youth culture but also that online games could serve as a compelling form of youth media and leadership development.

After piloting the P4K program, GK launched the scaled up version of the program in Brooklyn, NY. Over a ten-month school year, GK worked with the game design company Gamelab to engage a cohort of minority youth in the design, development, and dissemination of a professionally produced online game. In the spring, the program participants chose to develop a game on the general topic of poverty as an obstacle to education, based on their learning about the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. They then decided to use Haiti as a case study and setting for the game.