Jeanette Dorner continues her efforts to restore the watershed around Puget Sound so that salmon can continue to breed there. Her project started three years ago with ten rain gardens built to filter storm water that was polluting salmon streams, and has grown to over 600 rain gardens, with 12,000 more planned over the next six years. Her efforts, which include a variety of means to restore the watershed has been featured in national media, including The New York Times.
Jennifer Iannalo had a very personal motivation when she created ‘Zenfully Delicious’ as her game in the world during Landmark’s Team, Mangement and Leadership Program. Suffering from Fibromyalgia, Iannalo was supported by a team of people to make better lifestyle choices, dramatically improving her ability to live a happy and fulfilling life in spite of her condition. She realized that not many people have the support of the kind of team she did, so her project brought her team to the world – coaching and lifestyle support at the Zenfully Delicious website for people with gluten intolerance, fibromyalgia, and other forms of chronic pain.
Bonnie Smith’s game that she created in Landmark Education’s Team, Management and Leadership Program involved putting together a team of people to promote healthy living, including a day of healthy habits seminars. Titled ‘Creating Conversations for Healthy Habits’, Smith’s game was inspired by her life experience losing weight and getting healthy – Smith is passionate about ending obesity and giving people the opportunity to live healthy lives.
Drawing on her own experiences with weight loss and wellness, Bonni Smith created a powerful project dedicated to creating healthy conversations during her first year in Landmark Education’s Team Management and Leadership Program (TMLP). Working with a team of health coaches, Bonni coordinated with her local hospital to create a day of talks and demonstrations called Conversation for Healthy Habits with the goal to unite people in a conversation for good health and wellness.
Bonni shares, “as an obese child I felt alone and frustrated and didn’t feel I had the appropriate knowledge or resources to create balance in my life or a strong feeling of community to help me along the way. Conversation for Healthy Habits is a cooperation of people from different callings who are up to empowering each other as leaders and creating health and wellbeing for the community.”
Since the initial event, she continues to host weekly Habits of Health classes at the local hospital. Bonni continues to find new outlets for her program, including working with the Girl Scouts of America in Broward County, Florida. In fact, they have requested Conversation for Healthy Habits to be a part of the curriculum in alignment with Michelle Obama’s initiative to end childhood obesity. And she’s not stopping there! Bonni is committed to have Conversation for Healthy Habits a part of other communities. She is working with professional associations in human resources and the medical field to incorporate “lunch and learns” and is focusing on physician offices as a resource for the community to fight obesity and bring Conversation for Healthy Habits to everyone.
Bonni’s project was highlighted in a one minute video that she made and was presented with other videos of projects at a quarterly meeting of the TMLP. She’d never made a video before, but after watching some instructional videos on YouTube, Bonni reports, “I got that anything worth saying can be done in one minute, which taught me how to get to the point.”
Determined not to lose her new skills, she now creates videos for other people up to making a difference in health and wellbeing, including one for a funeral home that holds classes on bereavement and gratitude. This has fostered new partnerships and goodwill. Bonni shares, “it gets really exciting when the game goes viral. You just don’t know where your commitment is supposed to take you.”
As a result of the teams and communities she has created, Bonni has become a respected expert in her community and has stepped into several advisory boards that open up new avenues for Conversations for Health Habits. Her clients are continuing their healthy living conversations and some have even begun to coach people in their communities. In a nutshell, she is creating new communities and teams around what’s important in her life all the time.
“Teams are the only way to get something accomplished and I am clear from my Team training that it is never about me. I am always grateful and acknowledge the people that show up in my life. So many things are opening up — it’s so outrageous and humbling —it’s as if the community was just waiting for me to do this.”
Julie Kerrigan’s team game in the world that she created in Landmark Education’s Team, Management and Leadership Program was the Farm to Soup table event that she created as a part of Proctor Farmers Market in Tacoma, Washington. The event brought in three chefs from nearby restaurants, each of whom created unique soups using fresh, local produce and meats. The event took place on November 13th, with a keynote speech being given by Tacoma’s mayor.
Bowls of tasty soup were dished out for $3 apiece. The funds went towards other events being created at the market. The event also reinforced the value of buying food locally. To read more and get the soup recipes from the event, read the coverage from Tacoma Weekly.
Jeanette Dorner created ‘Joyful Tribe’ a few years ago as her game in the world in Landmark Education’s Team, Management and Leadership Program, as a means of generating donations to restore the Niqually watershed and revive its salmon populations. Dorner, who is the director of the salmon recovery program for the Nasqually Tribe Natural Resources Department, was recently quoted in The New York Times in an article covering efforts to restore the watershed. Read more
The following video presents team games in the world – community projects – created by people taking part in Landmark Education’s Team, Management and Leadership Program, and were presented in a short video presented in June 2011 in Chicago. The projects covered include efforts to save the salmon in the Pacific Northwest, creating healthy habits to get American Healthy, a retreat to celebrate recovery from addiction, and more.
People connected to Landmark Education’s Team, Management and Leadership Program may be interested to learn that Landmark Education has opened its newest program, titled Direct Access: Creating and Living a Future You Really Want.
The two-day program is designed to use recent work from the field of neuroscience to have people immediately and naturally taking action towards goals that they care about. The program, which comes out this fall, features multimedia elements as well as a lecture/discussion format over a Saturday and Sunday from 9am to 7pm each day.
There is also a promotion available with the course where the first people who register in each city will receive a free iPod Shuffle, and registrants are also entered into a drawing with the chance to win a year of personal coaching. Visit for more details.
Miche Ann Walsh was with her San Diego teammates at her completing weekend of Landmark Education Team, Management and Leadership Program (TMLP). It was April of 2010 and news about the BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico was spreading throughout the world. It was the largest marine oil spill in history and an unprecedented ecological disaster, so Miche took a stand.
“I got, in that moment, that my life was to be used for a greater thing, I realized I had to do something about it, because it was bigger than me…I saw that I was really going to be a contribution and it was worth packing things up, leaving my home, calling everybody, creating teams, and bringing into play all of my commitments towards a healthy planet. I knew that no matter where people stand they could make a difference”. Read more
Anuj Singhal, a participant in Landmark Education’s Team, Management and Leadership Program in Vancouver, has created a project to bring a new context of possibility to the media, going beyond what he was ever capable of doing himself.
Kelly Taing of Landmark Education’s Team San Diego has created a very interesting community…a community of hot wives. “The Hot Wife Club” is a community of women helping each other to live their dream life while having their own identity after marriage and children.
Ms. Taing was inspired to do this project when she began creating her dream life. While creating herself as a wife and mother, she became present to how other women struggle with their relationships and sometimes even let themselves go physically and emotionally. In her vision of her future self, Kelly chose to create her self as being a ‘hot wife’ and “The Hot Wife Club” was born. Read more
