Case studies

Every Lab starts with a question

Not a brief, not a deliverable — the question a room is actually carrying. Here are the questions we've been handed by utilities, boards, districts, coalitions and cultural institutions, and what was left when the room went home.

Trusted by

EBMUD · Public utility

“We provide clean water to every household in our region. How do we build trust with our customers so they skip drinking plastic bottled water? Can we connect them to the watershed and the water source?”

Tap water, watershed, and a song people carry home

The challenge: East Bay Municipal Utility District delivers some of the best drinking water in the country — and still watched customers reach for plastic bottles. The gap wasn't quality. It was relationship: most people had no felt connection to the Mokelumne watershed their water comes from.
The Lab: A Creative Lab took the utility's own truth-tellers — operators, educators, community staff — through the same curiosities they wanted to bring to the public. Lines about snowmelt, aqueducts, and turning on the tap without a second thought became a lyric bank, then a chorus built and sung in the room.
What was left: A song and a set of plain-language lines the district now uses in schools and community events — language about the watershed that people repeat without being handed a fact sheet. The campaign has reached 3.4M people.

H2O Flow AR x East Bay MUD — watch the Lab come to life

Watershed to tap · 1 Lab · 3.4M people reached

Research institute · Global staff retreat

“We know what structures create belonging, and what creates othering. But what does belonging actually feel like — and is that feeling universal, or does it change region by region, culture by culture?”

A global song of belonging

The challenge: UC Berkeley's Othering & Belonging Institute had spent years mapping the structures that produce belonging and othering. What the research hadn't yet answered was the felt experience underneath it — and whether that feeling holds steady across the regions and cultures where OBI's global staff actually work.
The Lab: At OBI's annual retreat, our Artist Fellows — trained in Participatory Action Research and behind a Grammy-winning body of work on restorative and transformative justice — led a songwriting Lab that turned the Institute's own inquiry back on its people. Staff didn't just discuss belonging, they wrote it, out loud, in their own words. What came out of the room was "We Belong."
What was left: "We Belong" didn't stay a staff-retreat song. It became the seed of a global education tool — regional versions produced for India, Kenya, and the Philippines, each one testing the same question in a new place: does this feeling translate, or does it take a different shape here? What started as one retreat's answer is now how OBI carries that question into the world.

1 Lab · Global staff

School district · Educator convening

“How do we get 300 educators to actually hear what belonging means to each other — not read it in a policy, but hear it in each other's voices?”

A room that sang belonging back to itself

The challenge: SFUSD needed a professional development day that did more than present a definition of belonging — they needed a way for 300 educators to hear it, in each other's own words, across a staff that rarely gets a room together like this.
The Lab: Tommy led a Creative Lab built around two things happening at once: teaching the craft of songwriting, and opening a real conversation about what belonging feels like in a classroom, a staff room, a district. Educators wrote their own verses — their own answers to that question — and the group learned the song together, section by section.
What was left: Not every Lab ends in a professional recording — and this one didn't need to. The educators performed the song for each other, live, as a full staff, each person's part landing in the room where it was written. The process was the memory: 300 people who walked in as colleagues and walked out having heard each other say, out loud, what belonging actually means to them.

1 Lab · 300 staff

Coalition of scientists · Scholar research

“How do we inspire climate activism when the news itself — the data, the warnings, the catastrophes — is so heavy that it's hard to even take in, let alone act on?”

An anthem for climate scientists

The challenge: Working with Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson's What If We Get It Right?, a global coalition of climate scientists, activists, farmers, and planet protectors faced a familiar problem: the information was urgent and correct, but urgency alone wasn't moving people to act. What the coalition needed wasn't more data — it was a way to carry the truth that people across every part of this work could actually hold onto.
The Lab: This one wasn't built in a room together — it was built from the coalition's own words and voices, gathered and woven into a single anthem. No facilitated dialogue, no live session: just the collected language of scientists, activists, farmers, and planet protectors who've spent careers inside this work, shaped into something that could carry what the research alone couldn't.
What was left: The song was featured at Harvard Climate Week and TEDx Planet Action — carrying the coalition's work into rooms far beyond a research paper, and amplifying Dr. Johnson's work to inspire climate activism at the scale it was written for. It's set to release as part of Brian Eno's SoundsRight campaign, built to be remembered, hummed, and passed on.

Harvard Climate Week · TEDx Planet Action · SoundsRight

Food systems nonprofit · Staff celebration

“What nourishes us — in our work, our food systems, our lives?”

An anthem grown from post-it reflections

The challenge: Mandela Partners closed out their year wanting more than a party. Their staff spans wildly different roles, goals, and cultures — and they wanted a celebration that actually honored that range, drawing out what nourishment means to each person, both in the food systems they work in and in their own lives.
The Lab: A one-hour Creative Lab, no circle of chairs: a message board, an instrument station asking what brings you joy, a pot and spoon asking what feeds you. Guests wrote on post-its at their own pace. Kaitlin and Tommy took those reflections — plus the organization's stated values and work — and wrote the anthem live, closing the party with a song built from the room itself.
What was left: One local team, one room, one question — and it cracked open something much bigger. The access Mandela Partners gave our artist facilitators became the seed for 'Food': an anthem for global food justice and sustainability, carrying one organization's own words into a question the whole planet is asking about what truly nourishes us.

1 Lab · Staff celebration

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