Group Building Events

Connecting & Creating Through Narrative

 Do you have a group that you'd like to help everyone connect and get to know each other more effectively? Maybe it's a based around a hobby, an activity, a non-profit, some community organization?

We offer events very similar to our team building events, to help your group dynamic.

These events started as an experiment we called "Fish and Bear" which was Lynn's reaction to her cancer experience. Spending long periods of time waiting, for doctors and for results, Lynn found herself understandably obsessing about her health. In order to distract herself she turned to her mobile phone, but the world was full of fear, full of division, and full of mistrust.

It didn't seem to make sense. The success of Uber, Lyft, and AirBnB proves that most people are on the whole decent, honest folks just trying to make their way through life. So why are we so divided?

Through teaching story Lynn had experienced firsthand how people connect by simply telling their stories... even people who theoretically shouldn't. She watched people listen to each other's stories, respect each other and become friends. They did not and do not need to agree.

We can't fix the political system, and even if we thought we could it's not where we have developed our skills. Our skills are in story, and so the Fish & Bear experiment was born.

That experiment led to our work with teams. However, the world remains divided and so we are still driven to help connect everyone. So if you have a group that you think would benefit from a stronger feeling of connection we'd love to hear from you. We keep costs extremely minimal for good causes and once it's safe to do so we can host the event at our purpose-built story studio in Van Nuys. For now, and for people not near Van Nuys, we use Zoom with a few customized additions to help smoothly run the events.

We are all interesting people, my friends - no matter what our internal narratives periodically tell us.

If you ask I'll explain to you why the experiment was called Fish and Bear. When we created the Fish & Bear experiment we didn't know what we would find. As the experiment developed we saw what it did and so we changed the name to reflect that. We used think that we had to teach people how to tell their stories, but really we just had to create the storytelling experience that would help them connect and repair.