A story of Dreamfish (you may have one, too:)...

Dreamfish helps people to become interactivists, to create positive change in organizations and communities with the kind of creative edge social support that they are asking for. Beyond the limits of professional and cultural silos, Dreamfish gives one an open place to feel alive, dive deep and be bold in making the world a better place. Everyone can dreamfish, regardless of education, class, ethnicity, culture or learning style. Dreamfish guides people to swim in the creative juice of green INTERspaces - interdisciplinary, intercultural, intergenerational spaces of collaborations that focus on generating social environmental vitality.

who flips da flippers

• Creative individuals who learn by doing and are looking for affordable access to empowering ways of learning and for a network of people, with whom to collaborate on new initiatives.
• Students and recent graduates in the professions, looking for practical learning, in alignment with their values.
• Mid-career or retired consultants, scientists, or professionals in transition and looking to make a powerful social impact
• Recognized leaders in the fields of business, organization development, arts and sciences
• Organizations which are working for positive change. For example, Dreamfish designed and facilitated a Dreamscape, a cultural change initiative for the International Society for Systems Sciences and a rebranding event for the Organization Development Network.

At the individual level, Dreamfish is about supporting these change makers. AND, at the cultural level, Dreamfish is here to spawn social innnovation by acting as a network lubricant....

To share my own story as a co-founder, I am a community performance artist, organization development consultant, social scientist, activist, a group facilitator at Stanford Graduate School of Business, a Gen X Berliner who lives a multicultural life, and an ecologist who has lived in the wilderness for 6 months. Being a cross-pollinator of many different networks, I am acutely aware of patterns of mind within networks, which block collaboration for good. These patterns of knowledge production include silo thinking, fracturization, "not enough" thinking, the marginalization of diverse ways of knowing. This is why Dreamfish brings together diverse people to work across differences. It is why we remixes participatory technologies to explore how we design our social systems for vitality.

Dreamfish helps people to be effective catalysts of sustainability by moving beyond the “banking model of education” (Friere), the scarcity model of economics and the expert model of a professional. In events and service learning projects, people engage diverse ways of knowing, experiencing and learning participatory methods from the arts, digital media and applied behavioral sciences. On our social networking site, people learn together across culture, generation and field.

Dreamfish strategically loves and leverages the coupling between social knowledge-creation, subjectivity, and social and environmental justice to create forms of knowledge that support sustainability. (I have explored this topic, from a body-centered perspective, using participatory arts as research method, tracking the characteristics of knowledge in social improvisation - from a group in the dance studio to improvisers in the workplace in Berlin, Germany. btw, this is a video documentary in production)

As Dreamfish networks generate social improvisation, people learn by doing social design principles that move beyond knowledge as representation (which is Eurocentric, btw). Together, people can also produce knowledge as relationship, 2. practical-aesthetic knowledge, 3. and responsive knowledge, which is knowledge as the capacity to respond to injustice. 

People, involved in Dreamfish projects, discover ways to move from representation to participation, from organization to network, from alienatation to vitality.