19 People Showed Up on a Sunday Morning. Not Because They Had To.

Written by: Jessica Low

There was no client waiting for us.

No invoice to send.

No ballroom. No corporate meeting room. No carefully arranged tables.

It was Sunday morning, 16 August 2026.

Nineteen people chose to show up at Buku Jalanan Chow Kit (BJCK) in Kuala Lumpur.

Fourteen were certified LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® Method facilitators, certified by the Association of Master Trainers in the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® Method. Five others came as volunteers.

Some had never worked together before. Some were meeting for the first time that morning.

Waiting for us were 55 stateless, mainly undocumented children.

We had approximately two and a half hours together.

Nobody had to give up their Sunday morning.

They chose to.

And for me, that was where the learning had already begun.

What do you ask a child to dream about when reality already places limits around them?

The intention behind the workshop sounded simple:

• Help the children imagine a possible future.

• Help them think about who they might want to become.

But there was a harder question underneath it.

What does it mean to invite a stateless child to dream?

Their circumstances are real.

Statelessness and lack of documentation create barriers that cannot be solved through positive thinking, one workshop or a box of LEGO bricks. UNICEF has highlighted the difficulties many stateless children in Malaysia face in accessing formal education. BJCK itself provides a safe space and home-schooling programme for stateless and displaced children who do not have access to public schooling.

So our message could not simply be:

“If you dream hard enough, you can become anything.”

That would be too easy for us to say.

Instead, I kept returning to this:

Your current status may be part of your reality. It does not have to be the only story you are allowed to imagine about your future.

So we invited them to build.

And then we listened.

Among the stories that emerged were dreams of contributing. Of becoming a soldier, imagined contributing to the country in which they live.

That stayed with me.

Children whose own place within the system remains uncertain were imagining a future in which they could contribute to it.

Our role was not to manufacture that hope.

It was to give it somewhere to be expressed.

Sometimes good facilitation means sitting on the floor

Another image from that morning has stayed with me.

Facilitators sitting on the floor with the children.

It sounds like a small thing.

Most of us are accustomed to something quite different: corporate rooms, adult participants, tables and chairs, professional language and carefully designed workshop environments.

None of that mattered very much that morning.

The children mattered.

So the facilitators adapted.

Questions became simpler.

Language became more basic and relatable.

People moved closer.

• They sat down.

• They watched for understanding.

• They listened differently.

• The question was no longer, “How do I run this process the way I normally would?”

• It became:

How do we help this child share the story they are trying to tell?

That reminded me of something fundamental about facilitation.

Good facilitators know that adaptability is part of facilitation. They translate the experience into something participants can relate to, engage with, and make their own.

A methodology gives us structure.

Facilitation asks something more of us.

It asks us to notice, adjust and meet the people in front of us where they are.

Fourteen facilitators. One shared purpose.

These 14 facilitators were not an established delivery team.

They did not come from the same organisation.

Some barely knew one another.

Yet when the children arrived, those differences quickly became less important.

Professional titles became less relevant.

Who had more experience became less relevant.

The focus shifted to one shared question:

What do these children need from us right now?

It made me reconsider what a learning community can become.

We often think of professional communities as places to exchange ideas, practise skills, build networks and continue learning.

Those things matter.

But perhaps there is another possibility.

A learning community can become a contributing community.

People learn something.

They develop capability.

And one day, they choose to use that capability for someone who might otherwise never have access to it.

That Sunday showed me what another form of that community could look like.

Learning comes full circle when capability becomes contribution.

The bricks may be expensive. The right to imagine should not be.

There was another thought I could not shake.

We were using LEGO® bricks.

Access to something like this can itself be a privilege.

But play should not belong only to those who can afford particular toys, schools, programmes or experiences.

The LEGO® Foundation's work on learning through play connects play with the development of creative, social, emotional, cognitive and physical skills.

That morning, though, I saw something much simpler.

The bricks became a language.

A child did not need to find the perfect words immediately.

They could build first.

Point.

Explain.

Add another brick.

Change something.

Tell the story in their own way.

And someone was there to listen.

For those two and a half hours, everyone had access to the same bricks.

Everyone had permission to build.

Everyone had a story worth asking about.

The bricks may be expensive. The right to imagine should not be.

Perhaps this is what paying it forward looks like

Who else benefits because you learned something?

Fourteen certified facilitators could have kept this capability within their professional work.

Instead, they carried it somewhere else.

Five other volunteers helped make that possible.

And 55 children were given a space to build, speak and imagine.

We did not change the realities surrounding statelessness in two and a half hours.

We should not pretend that we did.

But contribution does not always begin by solving the whole problem.

Sometimes it begins by showing up.

Sitting on the floor.

Listening carefully.

Adapting what you know.

And using something you have learned to create a little more possibility for someone else.

Nineteen people showed up on a Sunday morning.

Not because they had to.

They chose to.

And perhaps that choice is one of the most meaningful ways learning can be paid forward.