Leadership team and Internal Team
Important folks behind the scenes at NewStories help us do our work in the world. Right now NewStories has no staff. We turn to partners and contractors to help us, including these fine folks.
Bob Stilger founded New Stories in 2000. He now serves as President of NewStories where directs the Services Work that NewStories offers and is responsible for overseeing the structures, such as this website, that help NewStories to run smoothly.
Lynnaea's NewStories' work comes out of the longing for humanity to step out of old stories of who and what we are to come into greater wholeness as individuals and into a conscious and compassionate relationship with Earth and all life.
Her current work is curating NewStories to illuminate and disseminate new stories and practices for a life-affirming future. When not writing or speaking, she engage with small collaborative teams to strengthen, support and synergize the burgeoning new stories movement through convening, hosting, and facilitating social change workshops and gatherings.
Michele has known Lynnaea Lumbard since the late 1980's when she was a client of the national workshop company Lynnaea had co-founded. Over the course of that work she became interested in the fields of consciousness, energy work and interfaith spirituality, and has been supporting Lynnaea's work in various ways since that time. She is an experienced Voice Dialogue facilitator and has led a community solstice ritual for almost 20 years.
With a deep love of nature, Michele, along with her husband Steve, has led small groups on desert camping trips and loves to introduce people to both the vastness and intimacy of that landscape. She never stops being awed by the diversity of all things - plants, animals, rocks, but particularly the similarities and differences between people and cultures of the world. She has traveled to many countries including India, China, Morocco, Guatemala and much of western Europe.
Michele brings her sense of beauty and order to the NewStories growing family of websites. She provides technical support, design skills, as well as copy-editing to all the sites and has taken on a growing role as a contributor to the Great Transition Stories site.
Sommer Joy & Jon Ramer are Co Founders Of Synergized Impact Network Exchange and Compassion Games: Survival Of The Kindest. Sommer and Jon support NewStories in enhancing synergy strategy, building reach and meaningful community engagement through social media platforms and keep NewStories in relationship with the latest collective empowerment systems. Jon started the compassionate city movement in 2010 that now has over 400 cities worldwide actively participating. In 2012, what branched out of the compassionate city movement became the Compassion Games the antidote to the Hunger Games which started with two cities challenging each other to now cities, teams, and individuals around the world playing together. The Compassion Games has now served over 20 million people in over 50 countries and continues to be played three times a year amplifying service and compassion in action. Since 2011 Sommer has been on a self mastery quest and became a Black Belt Nia Teacher in 2018 and Founder of Garden Of Joy that helps individuals and organizations remove obstacles and live life guided by joy from the inside out. In 2018 Sommer & Jon started SINE (Synergized Impact Network Exchange) to empower individuals and organizations to synergize and collaborate to new heights. SINE is lead by the four A’s; Audacity, Agency, Abundance and Alchemy. Sommer and Jon just got married in 2018 with a commitment to higher love together and co creating Peace On Earth by 2030 with everything they do and share.
Using her experience as a learning scientist, neuroscientist, dancer, and dharma practitioner, Zanette invites the work of designing for life from a place of joy. Through embodied experiences that reveal and connect, Zanette activates teams and community leaders as they co-create specific new habits with the power to make visionary aspirations into reality. The practices of our daily lives are the key to changing our world toward resilience— Zanette’s two decades of work with Indigenous learning communities have taught her that values alignment, embodiment, and deep integration are keys to transformation that lasts. Relationship to place and ecology, relationship to kin and community, and relationship to self and shadow are vital elements that inform how each of us walks upon the Earth. Bringing to life new patterns for relationship, resilience, and regenerativity is the work that inspires Zanette’s multifaceted dance with living systems design.
