Helping your business tackle anything with joy & generosity
Difficult conversations don’t have to be hard.
For the past decade, Free Street has been a leader in facilitating difficult conversations with joy & generosity. Free Street Talks gives your organization, business or cohort the opportunity to problem solve, train, or create without having to plan all the logistics. The Free Street Talks team will custom-design workshops, agenda setting sessions, or trainings based on your company’s needs. We have experience and specialties in self-care workshops, DEI Trainings, agenda setting, strategic planning, curriculum development, and unearthing what is and isn’t working in an organization. Our previous clients include The Obama Foundation, Energy BBDO, The Skatepark Project, and ProPublica to name a few.
How It Works
Request a Start Up Call
Use our form on our contact page to tell us about you and what you are looking for - we’ll reach out to schedule a 30 minute chat.
Design & Discuss
Based on our start-up call, we’ll map out a plan which will include documentation, assessment, meeting with stakeholders and workshop planning, all depending on the needs of your project. You’ll have the opportunity to review our plan before moving forward.
Facilitate
We’ll lead the workshop, training, or series, making sure we adapt our plans as needed to ensure your goals are accomplished in the room.
Followup
We’ll write up what we learned during our workshop, and provide any recommendations we have. We’ll set a meeting to review these materials.
But what’s the cost?
Every organization has a different budget, and need. Costs typically range from $500 - $15,000. Reach out to us, and we’ll figure it out together.
Whether you need to train 100 people, agenda set with a small group, or discuss deep community issues, we got you.
What our clients are saying
The Obama Foundation
Training for 100 youth on community organizing and strategy: Free Street Talks led a series of 3 workshops for The Obama Foundation
“Free Street shows up prepared, with ideas, and that’s a great feeling. It’s hard to find thought partners in the creative space, and feeling you’ve met your match in terms of what you are trying to solve together, is invigorating…Free Street workshops are creative dynamic learning experiences that are strategically aligned and really provoke thoughtful learning experiences.” - Sophia Chung, Learning Design Associate
“Free Street workshops showcase the power of movement, art and theatre to enhance learning in ways that traditional learning design can fall short. The end result is more than the sum of its parts, often. The conversations we had enhance our ideas, just as our ideas inform how you do the workshop. In that sense, its a special power to be able to do that. Not every workshop can do that…Don’t over think it, just [hire Free Street Talks].” - Matthew Fulle, Learning Design Analyst
Near North Montessori School brought in Free Street Talks to help their parent committee agenda set for the year, centering DEI in the school and what they needed to be a more inclusive and equitable school as the main focus for the year. The workshop had 12 attendees.
“The process feels like a process. There are clear steps as you move the group of people through the thinking and organizing of thoughts.When people come together around something as significant and valuable and nuanced as equity, it can feel so big we can’t get anything done. The way [Free Street runs the] workshops helps people funnel to some real clarity.
At the time, I was trying to gather parent feedback on where they saw DEI work needing to go at our school. So from the parent perspective what was coming up for them, and what was priority for them. There were parents who I saw at your workshop who showed up to other things that I did, that I did not see before your workshop. They could see this is more than just sitting around and sharing our feelings, and felt moved to continue the work.
I would say hire Free Street because the workshop engages every single person no matter where they are coming into the room from. All range of previous engagement doesn’t matter, because Free Street has a format that works for anyone in the room. I was convinced of that because I saw [Free Street] do this workshop with high school kids, and the way [they] frame questions and the prompts, and the way [they] respond to feedback that comes up, its clear that [they] have been really intentional about how [they] do it. I think its really valuable when every person can feel they can jump into it. People can be so afraid to make a mistake and not say anything because of it. But the way [Free Street] structures it, there really is no need for hesitation or trepidation because we are working through this workshop together.” - Lauren Collins, Diversity Director at Near North
ProPublica Illinois
ProPublica Illinois worked with FS Talk over the course of two years. FS Talk facilitated workshops with ProPublica around the state of Illinois, and used the outcomes to help design a curriculum and protocol for journalists to investigate, acquire and write stories that better represented what was going on in communities. Over the course of the series, we facilitated over 150 people.
“[The Free Street Talks process] was so efficient for the goals we had. Efficient and memorable. Efficient in the sense that [Free Street are] all are such experts in listening, and getting many types of responses and information, and facilitating…you really don’t get that sort of nuance based on contrast and dialogue…there is not another organization I have experienced or know of that does it as well as [Free Street] does it.
When hiring Free Street you might feel unsure or that you are taking a big risk, and are intimidated by the process. But, it is entirely worth it. Leave yourself room to be surprised. There has been nothing in my career that I have experienced that has been parallel to the quality of conversation and discussion that so many organizations claim to be having about whatever topic it is, that has actually changed how I work.” - Logan Jaffe, ProPublica Jouranlist
Near North Montessori
