Let’s shift ideas into action…
Develop skills…
Design your own
What clients are saying…
Training for all skill levels
The ‘Engaging Beyond Words’ training was highly engaging, fun and wonderfully facilitated by Michelle! I have a background in graphic design and Michelle’s training was a great refresh on simple visual techniques to help audiences understand key concepts quickly. It provided practical details on how to expand my visual communication approach. On top of the toolkit offered, during the training we collaborated on real-life engagement challenges that were informative, invaluable and inspiring. I highly recommend this training for all skill levels as there was so much to learn.
Marina Nagibina
Design CoCreate
Relevant and Innovative
I hired Michelle to design and deliver a training on graphic facilitation for First Nations community engagement coordinators who work in rural and remote communities (2018). The training was fantastic focusing on relevant and innovative techniques. She worked well with the culturally diverse group as a highly skilled facilitator as well as sharing these skills with the participants. I recommend the training to others and hope to engage her again with our work in the North.
Patricia Howard
Manager Community Engagement, First Nations Health Authority
Collective Wisdom of People
Michelle is an amazing force in harnessing the collective wisdom of people, online and face to face. I have been a participant at events she facilitated, and a customer when she designed and facilitated for me. I especially appreciate her ability to anticipate how individual activities will unfold. Frequently, her design work involved being a sounding board for me where further distilling and sharpening of objectives for an event were needed. As a facilitator, she makes everyone feel heard and her competence allows me to focus on the learning process rather than worry about details. Working with Michelle produces excellent outcomes and outputs.
Stephan Gruber
Professor, Carleton University
Co-strategist, Evaluator and Researcher
Michelle has worked with me as a co-strategist, evaluator and researcher on several major projects with international agencies, including an evaluation of a major rural development network (IFAD), a capacity needs assessment for network growth (IFRTD), research into local level knowledge sharing (UNDP) and developing guidelines for Knowledge Partnerships with ADB.
Michelle brings a diverse range of skills and expertise to the field of knowledge management, networks and partnerships, including the ability to work with rural stakeholders, across cultures and languages; and is superb at effective workshop design and delivery to get to desired outcomes efficiently. She is able to research and synthesize large amounts of information into organized documents for decision makers, quickly and reliably. She is straightforward, transparent and accountable in the provision of her consulting services, a quick study in grasping the needs of the client and able to deliver a quality product on time.
Heather Creech
Former Director of Global Connectivity, International Institute for Sustainable Development
An Unbelievable Percentage
I worked with Michelle on a community engagement project. She took the lead, built a steering committee of diverse groups, co-ordinated the entire project while handling tricky relationships with skill and professionalism. The final written feedback questionnaire, designed by Michelle and stickhandled through the steering committee received a 60% response from the community, an unbelievable percentage. I credit Michelle and her work as the major reason that the response was so good. I recommend Michelle for any project to which she commits. I hope to have the pleasure to work with her again.
Richard Johnson
President, Arrow Lakes Environment Stewardship Society
Expert Advice and Support
Michelle has provided expert advice and support to assist the Columbia Basin Trust (CBT) to be a leader on challenging and innovative projects/processes for more than a dozen years. In the early 2000’s when climate change was starting to be understood by governments and the scientific community Michelle designed multi-year strategic initiatives with more than twenty local governments and communities to help these communities understand what climate change is, how it may impact local communities and what type of actions these communities should consider to be more resilient or adapt to a range of future climate scenarios. Related to international water policy, Michelle helped develop cutting edge processes to help develop the capacity of community leaders, elected officials and staff to both understand the range of issues they were facing, how these impacted their various areas of authority and what tangible actions they could take.
Michelle has worked collaboratively with CBT and others and is willing and generous in sharing her skills. She has been supportive of CBT staff and the many partners our organization works with. She demonstrated great skill and knowledge in working with a variety of partners groups (including NGO’s, local governments, provincial governments, first nations and federal governments). She creatively designed and facilitated hundreds of meetings to strategize, learn together and engage people on tough topics. Additional highlights include facilitating the kick off meeting of government, utilities and First Nations where they agreed (for the first time ever) to work on reintroducing salmon to the Columbia River, assisting CBT staff to design a new organizational department for the Trust, and assessing long standing initiatives for learning and their evolution. She brings a broad wealth of skills and experience adding value to any team. Michelle is especially skilled helping to think through very complex multi layered issues and lay out very practical and useful frameworks for addressing this complexity. If you need help solving interesting complex problems Michelle Laurie is the person for your job!
Kindy Gosal
Executive Director, Special Initiatives, Columbia Basin Trust
Learning along the way…
Reflective practice is a part of our DNA.