Let's work together
We’re here to help you change your story and change what’s possible. We’re facilitators, researchers, thought partners and teachers. For almost 20 years now we have co-created the spaces where people gather to have conversations that matter. These conversation lead to wise action changing lives, communities and organizations.
We work with an intergenerational teams of diverse master practitioners – social process designers, facilitators, community organizers, artists, mindfulness guides, coaches and storytellers – from all over the world who have, for decades, been designing and facilitating spaces that move from conversation to action.
what we offer

Facilitation
We design and facilitate gatherings in many forms, including retreats, workshops, conferences, and trainings. Our facilitation brings people together to share problems, opportunities, and challenges. Working at the personal and collective levels, we weave people together with deep listening, artful design and skillful facilitation and bring the knowledge present in any system to the surface. Our approaches emphasize helping people see the systems they are in with wide open eyes, to step forward when they can to provide their leadership, and to catalyze effective action. We’ve been doing this work in North America and all over the world for nearly 20 years now.
Ready to change what’s possible? We can help. Explore our approach below.
Strategic Convening
NewStories can help you bring people together to explore possibilities, crack intractable problems and take collective action. We do this in communities and in orgnanizatons. Our approaches make it possible for you to uncover the deep knowledge people in your system hold – and then put it to use!
We use many approaches for strategic convening, including FutureSessions. NewStories worked with Knowledge Dynamics Institute at Fuji Xerox and later FutureSessions, Inc. in Japan to develop an approach to create innovation in businesses, organizations and communities called FutureSessions. They strengthen relationships, build trust, share ideas and then develop prototypes for action.
Research and Analysis
NewStories believes that powerful research and analysis is essential as we work with the complex and sometimes daunting issues of our times. Using complexity-aware approaches like developmental evaluation, outcome harvesting, and Most Significant Change, we can help you use literature review, case studies, and deep listening to reveal what’s actually going on.
In 2016 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation asked us to use our research and analysis skills to do a Listening Tour on Creating a Culture of Health. This Final Report shows what we found and what it means.
Learning Programs
NewStories can help you create a customized learning program that helps your people in your community or organization learn how to lead more effectively and take action in these turbulent times. We can co-create custom workshops, seminars, retreats, and learning journeys addressing your needs and goals.
Maybe a workshop on participatory leadership would help in an organizational change effort. Perhaps a learning journey to listen differently to people in the community would be helpful. Maybe it is time for a retreat to look really closely at past work. Changing your story is easier with experiences which give new perspectives and insights.
Talk to us about what you want to learn, and we’ll create a plan to help get you there
Coaching and Consulting
In addition to teaching and facilitating, we’re also thinking partners. Sometimes, what you need most is that extra perspective to help guide you to the answers you already hold. We can be your coaching partner, providing the support and guidance you need to shift your systems and write new stories.
We’re happy to engage with you in-person or via video conferencing to help you take an indepth look at what wants to come next. Our coaching and consulting work is highly customized, and may include deep listening, brainstorming with you, asking questions you’ve not examined and helping you design new starting points.
We can help you know what you already know and develop new strategies and starting points which build on your experience.
our core team
NewStories provides facilitation and strategic convening services with a core team of skilled practitioners who have worked together for a number of years.
We can surf these tides of change together!
LISTEN FOR TRUTH
We search for what’s unspoken but ready to be revealed. When the mix of multiple perspectives generated by diverse experiences is greeted by curiosity, not judgment, new insights begin to emerge.
ACT AND LEARN
Using not just our minds but our whole body as sensory organ we can look at the whole system. After finding leverage points for systemic change, we catalyze cycles of action and reflection. Our work is inspired by design thinking, idea generation, prototyping then scaling. Making use of developmental evaluation practices to track progress and impact.
If you want to catalyze your conversations into action...
CONVENE POWERFUL CONVERSATIONS
This tacit knowledge, made explicit, has more insight than a cadre of consultants. Well hosted conversation is what can bring it forward. We start by creating a safe space, and inviting people forward with curiosity, respect and generosity and ask them set aside their fears, judgments and suspicions. Often, it takes time just to get to this point -- where people will speak their truth and listen to each other.
We use a variety of verbal and non-verbal approaches to gradually release the knowledge already present in the room and to help people strategize ideas that are emerging into action.
SHARE THE STORIES
Sharing those stories, listening deeply, using them as a compass to discover and take right action is the foundation for transformative change. Stories are invitations, provocations, and inspirations. They help us find meaning and make sense in our chaotic times.
Stories reveal the knowledge and builds the relationships we need for transformative change.
LEVERAGE DIFFERENCE
We’re all in this together. Most of us know that our own ideas are only part of what’s needed to move forward. Sometimes we grudgingly admit that the perspective of another has value. From time to time we remember that unless it works for all of us, it doesn’t really work for any of us.
AND, it is challenging to bring people with different perspectives, experience, values and beliefs into the same room and have more than rhetoric, stoney silence, posturing and mind-numbing arguments.
Communities have diverse, knowledge, resources and capacities. When we bring the people together across difference to share stories and experiences, successes and failures, magic happens. We help people in place-based communities, groups tackling particular issues, businesses and organizations get real with each other, respecting each other enough to share their experiences and their truths without blame or judgement.
We know that most people just want a good life for themselves, their families and friends. Unfortunately, we’re in a time when the knee-jerk reaction is to find someone else to blame for our problems. We’re quick to “other” people and make up stories about those with a different viewpoint. Time to stop that. Time to slow down and listen for a change. We can help.
REPEAT
Looking for a partner?
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
Sonoma County Rises
Working with NewStories has been filled with transformative experiences. After the fires devastated our Northern California community, we were searching for answers as to how our community could be intentional in its recovery to ensure that no one in our community fell through the cracks. A very overwhelming concept, being that our systems were not (Continue Reading)
Ana Lugo Steering Committee Member, Sonoma County Rises February 27, 2019
Shambhala Authentic Leadership in Action
Bob Stilger helped bring the world to our gatherings in Nova Scotia, broadening our otherwise North American-centric perspective. In virtual and in-person meetings and gatherings, he created spaces for genuine dialogue, emergent insights and lasting connections. He did this through his natural and intuitive convening skills as well as his personal practice of showing up fully, with warmth, humor and humble wisdom. (Continue Reading)
Susan Szpakowski, Former Executive Director February 25, 2019
High River, Alberta, Canada
My community had experienced a devastating experience and I was fortunate enough to be trusted to support some recovery efforts. I had been introduced to Bob Stilger and NewStories through a mutual friend and I just knew he was the right person to help me. I love Bob’s gentle yet prodding way of inviting you to consider a truly new way of being and behaving. The default is to think you want to put things back the way it was, I knew this was a time to seize the possible and I needed help bringing others into that. (Continue Reading)
Jodi Dawson Our High River February 24, 2019
Change Agent, Inc, Japan
Our long time friend and mentor Bob Stilger has shown up in Japan in ordinary times as well as extraordinary time after the March 11, 2011 Triple Disasters. He has brought a variety of tools and methodologies to help people come together and talk so that we can move forward to a better future. Most importantly, (Continue Reading)
Riichiro "Rich" Oda, Founder February 23, 2019
FutureSessions, INC, Japan
Bob said to me that the definition of success for Japan might change, just after the huge earthquake on March 11th, 2011. He was at my back, supporting me, and changed my life to start a cross sectoral innovation company. His commitment has been unbelievable. He has been contributing hundreds of days to Japan to (Continue Reading)
Takahiko Nomura, Ph.D CEO, Future Sessions Inc. Professor, Kanazawa Institute of Technology February 19, 2019
ELOS Institute, Brazil
Bob has played a vital role in a moment of transition of Elos by deeply listening to what was possible for our organization what the story was that we were really willing to bring into this world. The last years he's supported our worldwide community to do the same, reading between the lines and words (Continue Reading)
Niels Koldewijn and Val Roca Program Managers, Instituto Elos February 15, 2019
Spokane County Health District
Bob Stilger, Co-President of NewStories, helped us at the Spokane Regional Health District (SRHD) to formulate how we engage staff in the work we are doing on health equity. He introduced us to Berkana’s Two Loops which provided our team with a framework from which we can view transition and change. It was valuable to (Continue Reading)
Rowena Pineda Program Manager, Spokane Regional Health District February 14, 2019
Sonoma State University
New Stories' Bob Stilger and Simone Torrey are grounded visionaries who understand that humanity's well-being is inextricably connected to the well-being of the planet. Their work in supporting the resilience and transformation of local communities is at once accessible and sophisticated, thoughtfully designed and adaptable, and overall, enacted with deep presence and wisdom. Bob and (Continue Reading)
M. Rako Fabionar The HUB at SSU February 11, 2019
stories from our work

One Story: A Report of The First Peoples’ Convening on Climate-Forced Displacement
In October 2018, over sixty representatives of 28 First and Indigenous communities met in Girdwood, Alaska, for a first-of-its-kind gathering: the First Peoples’ Convening on Climate-Forced

Paradise
How Paradise, California regenerates a healthy and resilient community after the devastating fires of November, 2018 may provide critical learning on how communities step beyond the almost irresistible force to return to the old normal after disaster. Here’s a bit of what we are discovering with Paradisans.

After the Fires in Northern California
I was in Sonoma and Napa Counties earlier this month. Listening, asking, feeling, listening some more. I’ll share reliable statistics when I find them. Hundreds