What is HaHaHelps?
HaHaHelps is a comedy-based psychosocial programme designed to support youth facing adversity. We work alongside counsellors and social workers to extend reach to youth who don’t engage with traditional care, creating warm on-ramps to help-seeking.
In our workshops, participants engage in structured improvisation, play, and guided reflection to build resilience, strengthen communication, and develop emotional coping skills — all while bringing joy back into the room.
How it works
Each session follows a deliberate arc. We begin with a voluntary check-in circle, where participants can share how they’re doing. From there, the session centres on a specific psychosocial theme — such as confidence, perspective-taking, managing mistakes, or speaking up.
Improv exercises are intentionally sequenced around that goal, with brief reflection prompts after each activity to help youth connect the experience to real-life situations. The cycle repeats, reinforcing skills through practice, insight, and connection.
Through this structure, young people can experiment socially in a safe, playful environment while quietly strengthening real-world communication and coping skills.
To expand access, HaHaHelps provides facilitator training globally, equipping communities to run workshops independently and sustainably.
No endless waitlists. No expensive therapy. Just connection, laughter, and tools that actually work.
Origin
In comedy classrooms, young people who struggled most with confidence and belonging at the start often demonstrated the most meaningful growth by the end. Through improvisation, they took social risks, learned to recover from mistakes, and discovered that their voice mattered.
What began as an artistic practice gradually evolved into something more deliberate. Observing these shifts over years of teaching, founder Youness Robert-Tahiri began refining a structured model — pairing improv exercises with guided reflection to intentionally build communication skills, emotional regulation, and relational resilience.
Rooted in both lived experience and professional training, HaHaHelps was designed to create environments where youth facing adversity can experiment safely, connect authentically, and rebuild confidence through play.
Since 2024, the model has been implemented in residential care settings in South Africa and is now being formally evaluated through graduate research at the University of Cape Town. The goal is simple but ambitious: to develop a scalable, culturally adaptable intervention that helps communities strengthen youth resilience through structured, evidence-informed play.
HaHaHelps began with a pattern
The story behind HaHaHelps began long before the programme itself.
Years of performing and teaching improv helped shape the exercises at the heart of the programme.
After graduating from the University of Toronto, Youness moved to South Africa, where HaHaHelps is now being implemented and formally evaluated.