Laughaste Laugh Yoga Children’s Program

K-12 STEAM education

Central LA East LA South LA

Expand existing project, program, or initiative (expanding and continuing ongoing, successful work)

Today’s children are experiencing rising levels of stress, anxiety, and disconnection from joy. Laughter and play—once foundational to childhood development—are being replaced by screens, isolation, and overstimulating content. School structures often limit playtime, and many children lack emotionally supportive home environments. Without healthy outlets, their emotional intelligence, self-worth, and resilience suffer. Holistically HEALarious addresses this by restoring laughter, movement, and mindfulness to children’s lives through a culturally-rooted, trauma-informed approach. By doing so, we nurture their mental, physical, and emotional well-being, helping them develop empathy, self-confidence, and positive peer relationships. Our program disrupts the pattern of emotional suppression and builds joy muscles in communities most impacted by systemic stress and adversity.

Holistically HEALarious presents the Laughaste Laugh Yoga Children’s Program , a trauma-informed, joy-centered wellness initiative designed to uplift the whole child—mind, body, and spirit. This unique program blends laugh yoga, mindful breathing, comedic motivation, expressive movement, and affirmations to offer children transformative tools for stress relief, emotional awareness, and authentic connection. Grounded in ancestral healing, cultural celebration, and wellness equity, the program delivers healing through humor in schools, group homes, community centers, and after-school spaces across LA. Children instinctively gravitate toward laughter and play, but today’s tech-driven world, combined with academic pressure and unstable home lives, is depriving them of joyful expression. Our program intentionally restores this balance by boosting emotional intelligence, supporting early developmental needs, and helping kids regulate emotions with laughter as the medicine. This grant will help us train additional facilitators, partner with local schools and community organizations, and provide free or low-cost programming to underserved communities. We will offer sessions weekly, introduce parent-child connection components, and develop materials that encourage continued laughter practices at home and in the classroom. Our goal is to re-center joy as a sacred and necessary part of growing up—making healing playful, accessible, and lasting.

Los Angeles will see a generation of children who are more emotionally intelligent, connected, and joyful. Classrooms will become more harmonious, homes more nurturing, and communities more resilient. Youth from underserved neighborhoods—who often carry intergenerational stress and trauma—will have consistent access to tools that help them regulate their emotions, build self-worth, and strengthen interpersonal relationships. This program plants seeds of healing through laughter, fostering a ripple effect that touches teachers, families, and entire school ecosystems. In the long term, we envision scaling the program across LA County with certified facilitators, creating curriculum partnerships with LAUSD, and offering digital resources that support at-home and classroom-based use. By centering joy and laughter in childhood development, Holistically HEALarious reshapes how we approach emotional wellness, with levity and laughter to even the heaviest circumstances.