Empowering Communities Through Puppetry
Puppeteers Without Borders creates customized training modules and experiences through puppetry in education, family planning, health care, and social services throughout the world.
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Our aim is to demonstrate and encourage the art of applied puppetry in communities dealing with sensitive issues.
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Creativity
Community
Connectivity
Vision
To promote health education, family planning, non-violent communication, environmental awareness, cultural diversity and human rights by empowering communities through puppetry arts.​
What We Do
We train healthcare and education professionals to apply puppetry in their specific work environment.
Our target training is with, but not limited to, the following:
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Teachers
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Therapists
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Nurses
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Social Workers
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Community Health Workers
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Professional Puppeteers
Why Puppets?
Puppetry is an ancient art that is charming, playful, and heartfelt. Puppet theater is a natural conduit for storytelling – within a nurturing group dynamic. The act of creating a puppet character and giving it voice allows for emotional expression, education and the exploration of taboo subjects.
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We work together to cultivate a trusting environment.
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We facilitate storytelling to identify stories that need to be told and heard.
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We play with basic puppet-making techniques and build our puppets together.
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We learn how to manipulate the puppets, and to present puppet stories to each other in a joyful way.
"Working with Erica Sapir from 'Puppeteers without borders,' has inspired us to develop tools that are valuable in creating a sensitive process, in an ICDP context."
- Sissel Sollied
Postdoctoral Fellow,
Department of Education, University of Tromso, Norway
"The spirit and good disposition of Ms. Kaplan were very important to get the participants to open their hearts and share their very own touching experiences"
- Adrian Lorenzana
Fundación Paiz para la Educación y la Cultura, Guatemala
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"I feel full of positive waves, of desire to put into practice, this day is once again a real pleasure... beautiful exchanges through listening, puppet making, good humor and the pleasure of playing and seeing playing..."