Phim Thank You For Your Service

[Florentina Holcombe]

I just want to send a HUGE thank you to the entire conference planning team for creating such an accessible and informative conference experience! I very much enjoyed every session I had the chance to be a part of and will certainly use what I have learned to improve my own research and practice.

It was amazing to know the services extended to the reentry population but most of the public is not a welcoming atmosphere specially the livelihood aspect. We always hear everyone is entitled to a second chance, but those second chances were so difficult and unreachable to the reentry individual.

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Earlier this spring, I had a bit of an earworm in my head. Instead of a song, it was a question: What would it be like if I could transform the space of one of my favorite teashops and cafes, Teaism Tea Shop , into a retreat? This led to a conversation with Lela S. , who graciously offered Teaism's space as a sponsor host.

We also worked with Lela to curate a Teaism-catered menu for both days of our retreat. Guests ate yogurt parfaits, goat cheese frittatas, ginger scones, Hungarian tea cakes, kebob platters and more while sipping Anxi oolong, Yunnan Gold Black and iced Moroccan mint green tea.

Once we settled on hosting the event in early August, I set off to cast my vision and assemble my team. The first step was reaching out to Ariana Rodriguez-Gitler , my longtime event collaborator. We have been in the trenches together since 2018, when we helped co-organize AIGA DC 's DC Design Week with an incredible group of volunteers. I knew Ariana would be someone I could count on the moment I showed up on a very cold October morning for Ariana's event, and I saw her fighting against the elements (mud, wind and rain) to pitch up a tent and put together two days of outdoor interviews with creative leaders from the DC community, on top of hosting art workshops.

The good news: Ariana's DCDW program went spendidly, despite the torrent of non-stop rain. The rest of the good news: 2018 created a strong foundation for future collaborations, from organizing other DCDW and AIGA-related programs to throwing together a collage workshop.

Luisa Ardila , Logan Dulski and Raksa Yin signed on to be my media production team. They brought their cameras, gimbals and A/V equipment to capture the essence of the retreat. It is thanks to them that I have HD images and videos that I can share with all of you! Make sure to follow my @hawj_studio Instagram page to see the behind-the-scenes reels that I will continue to post over the next quarter.

I knew I needed to call upon Artis Moon Amarch , who has a gift for combining sound, meditation and reiki healing into the most magical immersive experiences. Artis is also my reiki master. She has guided me through my spiritual journey over the last five years. (For DC folks, Artis does sold-out sound meditations at Eaton DC on Thursday evenings. Make sure to go to one of her programs if you have never had the privilege of attending!)

I also knew I couldn't do the retreat without my tarot and limpia (energy cleansing) guide and mentor Daniela Fant from The Dark Arts Of. Daniela's spiritual wisdom comes from a long line of psychic mediums, healers, and bruja(o)s. She led our attendees through a limpia workshop focused on releasing negative energies and traumas.

To round out the circle of healers, I also invited Kendra SatSaroop Kaur to join us. Kendra has a background in yoga and holistic health-and-wellness education for national health-care providers and adults and children. She introduced attendees to kundalini yoga and her intuitive reiki readings and energy healing work.

Although healing retreats tend to have an understandable emphasis on healers, I also wanted to invite practitioners from different backgrounds to do grounding and integration work. This is why I invited two storytellers into the mix: Tandra Turner and Angela Wu .

Tandra specializes in improv performance and training. She talked about the power of mindfulness and active listening and collaboration with our attendees. Her workshop was a reminder that healing retreats can also focus on play, levity and creativity. She helped wake up everyone's inner child with her fun and joyful improv exercises.

Angela Wu helped balance the storytelling and integration work with a beautiful journaling workshop. She introduced different journaling modalities such as The Artist's Way's morning pages (the goal is to write three pages of stream-of-consciousness thoughts while reserving judgment). Attendees got so immersed in this experience that many folks said they wished they had more time to write, despite the fact that we set aside an hour for Angela's workshop!

Attendees enjoyed taking a break from being indoors, even taking off their shoes while listening to Inja's interesting prompt: Instead of walking the earth and thinking about how it impacts us, have you ever noticed how you impact the earth with your footsteps? Notice how your feet bend blades of grass, how living creatures may move around you because of your steps. You don't have to go into a forest in order to observe how to be in nature. You can do this wherever you are.

Valerie Beard shared her background in cacao and chocolate sustainability from her work through Conservation International. She led attendees through an educational chocolate and cacao-tasting workshop. This included a cacao juice tasting, an astrology-inspired chocolate tasting (featuring chocolate from different regions of the world) and a historical recap of cacao ceremonies and chocolate production. Folks left understanding why chocolate has been long considered natural medicine and the food of the gods.

Our retreat was truly a team effort thanks to the beautiful souls I have shared with you in this short recap. I look forward to sharing more about each speaker's session in future newsletters. For now, I'll wrap up this lengthy note with a couple more group shots that display the kind of beautiful and warm energy that was present during our entire retreat.

PS If you missed out but would like to tap into the magic, I will be offering a special Halloween special between now and Halloween: $35 in-person tarot readings (20-30 min) and $55 tarot lessons (45 min). These sessions can be 1:1 or organized as small circles if folks want to invite friends. Please send me a person note if you'd like to learn more.

Dear friends, my partner Raksa Yin recently joined Amtrak to help lead its new innovation team as a design expert. This has made me reminisce about my own experiences in innovation design--and it has helped me connect the dots between how an innovation designer became a life coach and holistic healer.

On the design side, this was true because the UX, product design and design systems fields were still finding their footing. Common concepts like material design and design ops originated in 2014. This meant early adopters, such as startups and digital product companies, had a leg up on legacy companies or teams new to the tech scene. That said, if you surveyed any designer, developer or PM from that time, they would say that everyone was building from scratch and learning as they were going.

I joined my team at POLITICO when it was just six months old. This meant that our design maturity was still in its infancy. We hovered somewhere between Limited and Emergent within our department (we sat on the company's commercial and tech innovation side, with the unique task of creating product solutions that could be experimented with and passed onto the editorial product side when appropriate). Folks on our team had been recruited due to our unique areas of expertise around design, product and business development. The hope was for us to move the company towards a Structured and Integrated maturity level.

• Learn everything there is to know about 360, AR/VR and emerging technologies; tell us how this can influence digital multimedia storytelling and business development (as well as what we should be sandboxing)
• Study influencer audiences (affluent and educated professionals with influential jobs in government, business and technology) and understand 1) what makes them tick 2) how to pique their curiosity 3) how they like to learn and engage with content and people; figure out innovative solutions for their challenges
• Research global market trends, sociopolitical drivers and pop culture and forecast future fads, movements and audience/business demands; make sure also to find a way to tie this back to innovative design and media products and services
• Walk non-design teams through the theory and application of human centered design (HCD--also known as design thinking); evangelize how HCD can be tied back to increases in revenue and audience retention

I will be honest: I over-identified as a designer during this season of my life, to my own detriment. I was proud of having the title of senior designer and that I was on a special innovation team. I leaned into my work and burned the midnight oil because I was so excited about innovation strategy and design. That said, my team ran up against what most innovation teams encounter:

• Naysayers: people--especially in management or leadership positions--who refuse to greenlight or support ideas out of fear of change
• Risk-averse org cultures: work environments and teams that want to play it safe (being latecomers vs. early adopters)
• Clunky and antiquated infrastructure and processes: technological and operational bottlenecks that slow down development