Garden of Joy

A lifetime of movement, creativity, and connection

Sommer Joy Ramer is an educator, dance teacher, artist, and guide of Garden of Joy, a movement-based experience that helps students and people of all ages explore emotional wellness, imagination, connection, creativity, and compassionate community through dance, story, music, and playful embodied learning.

For 30 years, Sommer has taught dance, using movement as a pathway for learning, expression, belonging, and human connection. Her work has reached children, college students, adults with developmental disabilities, elders, and people living with Alzheimer’s and other forms of memory loss. These experiences have shaped her belief that every person has an innate capacity to move, create, communicate, and contribute when welcomed exactly as they are.

Foundations in inclusive care and movement

Sommer studied Therapeutic Recreation at Western Washington University, supporting children and adults with a wide range of developmental disabilities and creating inclusive recreational and movement experiences. During her university years, she also guided fellow college students in leadership and teaching roles and helped lead camp experiences for adults with developmental disabilities.

Her professional work continued in senior living and Alzheimer’s care. Until 2012, she worked as an Activity Director and Therapeutic Recreation Specialist, designing programs that supported connection, creativity, movement, engagement, and quality of life.

A longtime somatic movement educator, Sommer spent more than a decade teaching Nia. She attained the Nia Black Belt and taught until 2020, deepening her understanding of body awareness, expressive movement, music, and the relationship between physical movement and emotional well-being.

Compassion across communities

Sommer is a co-founder of Compassion Games: Survival of the Kindest, where she has served for more than a decade and remains active today. She has collaborated with peacebuilders, educators, Indigenous leaders, artists, spiritual communities, and social-impact organizations around the world, traveling internationally and using dance, ceremony, creativity, and compassionate action to strengthen relationships across cultures and communities.

Peacebuilding, social justice, care for the Earth, and respect for our shared humanity continue to inform the heart of Garden of Joy. Garden of Joy launched to the world through dance at Fields of Healing in Australia in 2018.

Bringing Garden of Joy to children and schools

Today, Sommer brings this lifetime of experience together in her work with children and schools. Garden of Joy invites young people to discover that movement can be a language for what they feel, imagination can be a source of possibility, and their unique gifts matter.

Through guided dance, storytelling, creative exploration, and meaningful connection, she creates inclusive spaces where students can practice self-expression, emotional awareness, empathy, confidence, cooperation, and joy.

At the center of her work is a simple invitation:

What becomes possible when children are given the freedom to move, imagine, connect, and discover the gifts they already carry?

Sommer’s intention is to help cultivate a generation of young people who feel more connected to themselves, one another, their communities, and the living world—and empowered to bring their own creativity and compassion into the future.