Facilitated by: Jessica Ortiz & Alex Wielunski

In this interactive workshop, you'll explore how “polarity thinking” can improve your ability to think and then respond more effectively during times of increasing volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and rapid change. Together, we'’’ unpack “polarities” and leverage them to create new and better ways of working.

Facilitator: Katie Abbott

Grief is not something to fix or rush through—it’s something to nourish. In the aftermath of loss, grieving employees often return to workplaces that expect productivity over presence, silence over story, and resilience over rest. This human-centered design workshop invites social impact leaders, healthcare professionals, and changemakers to explore how we can design systems that honor grief as part of our shared humanity.

Together, we’ll ask: How can we move beyond productivity-centered bereavement policies to cultivate cultures of respect and dignity for those navigating profound loss?

Grounded in real-world examples and trauma-informed practices, this session offers a path toward moving from suffocating grief to nourishing it—creating environments where healing and humanity can coexist at work and in our communities.

Facilitated by: Jenn Schiffman & Jeffrey Wetherhold

Great design doesn't implement itself. Designing for healthy futures requires clients who are motivated to move your ideas forward. How exactly do you help them do that?

There are decades of research on conversational techniques that unlock intrinsic motivation. The kind of motivation that you can't create but can help people discover within themselves. The kind that endures. You should be using this stuff!

This workshop will introduce core principles and skills for influencing clients to adopt your ideas with respect and dignity, inspired by evidence-based approaches such as Motivational Interviewing and Deep Canvassing. No manipulation. No arm twisting. Learn how to use your powers of influence for good, with examples and opportunities to practice.

Facilitated by: Amy Heymans & Erica Olenski

We will leverage futures thinking methods to world build a preferred future for US Healthcare in the year 2050 and backcast to the present day.

Facilitated by: Sydney & Barry Williams

In this experiential workshop, participants explore how nature’s model of reciprocity can help us design systems that uphold dignity within ourselves, our organizations, and the world around us. Drawing from Reciprocity Rx™, a framework developed through our programs on public lands, we’ll move through four phases—Receive, Reflect, Return, and Reconnect—to ground, listen, and design from relationship rather than extraction. Through guided reflection, small-group dialogue, and movement inspired by natural cycles, participants will leave with practical tools for staying resilient in turbulent times and for embedding reciprocity into the systems they shape.