Alan is a highly respected international creative thinking advocate, author, speaker, consultant, facilitator and college professor. His book BROKEN CRAYONS: Break Your Crayons and Draw Outside the Lines has been published in the USA, Turkey, Slovenia and South Africa and purchased by people in many countries around the world.

Ben Weinlick is the founder of Think Jar Collective. Currently, Ben is the Executive Director of a large 500 employee, 22 million a year NGO called Skills Society in Canada. Skills Society has a long history of innovation and advocacy for the rights and inclusion of people with developmental disabilities.

Brooks Hanewich’s career reveals his balance of creative thinking and finely tuned critical thinking abilities. After graduating from the University of Alberta, where he studied economics and sociology, Brooks didn’t go for a typical career path.

Colin Funk is a seasoned facilitator and program designer in the area of creativity and leadership development. He has spent the last 20 years working as a facilitator, director and theatre producer throughout western Canada. He is a graduate of the BC Institute of Technology – Broadcast Communications (1981), and a graduate of the Vancouver Playhouse –Theatre Arts and Dramaturgy (1985).

Lilly is six and inspires many with her quirky, funny and fresh perspectives.  Lilly is studying piano, draws and often is found tweaking the controls on her dad's many vintage synthesizers.  Lilly will contribute her curiosity, fresh perspective, art and photography to the think jar collective.

Collective members that know her well, think Debbie Reid, M.Ed, is one of the brightest and wildest minds, period. She gracefully balances a hilarious sense of humor with sharp insight. Her career leading social change in Community Disability Services spans more than 3 decades.

Emerson Csorba is a fourth-year student at the University of Alberta in Sciences Politiques. He’s a co-founder of The Wanderer Online and a contributor to publications such as The Globe and Mail, Maclean’s On Campus and University Affairs. A 3M National Student Fellow, Emerson will release his first book, The Baseball Degree, in August 2013.

Jaime Calayo is a graduate of the Strategic Foresight and Innovation masters program at OCAD University. His work focuses on creating emotionally impactful ways to conduct public engagement. Through telling emotionally compelling stories about how things could be, there are opportunities for people to see things through other perspectives.

Jessica’s post-university career included stints as a dance and yoga teacher, freelance choreographer, life-drawing model, barrista, brand-name-yoga-pant-hawker and aimless traveller, but she ultimately settled on storytelling as a vocation and has been a working journalist in and around Vancouver since 2008.

Jim Force, Ph.D. is a semi-retired free-lance educator with over 40 years of teaching and learning experience as well as program design experience. Jim specializes in leadership development through the study of small group dynamics, interpersonal communications and critical and creative thinking. He uses experiential educational approaches to animate the various concepts being studied.

Kent McKay is Communications Director at Manasc Isaac, an innovative, award-winning architectural firm and a recognized Canadian leader in sustainable design.

Leslie Ehm is President & Chief Fire Starter at Combustion. She has been working in the world of creative collaboration for over 25 years. A former musician and TV host turned advertising Creative Director (McCann), she first launched agency-centric training company (Three Training) followed by Combustion, devoted to igniting organizational creativity.

Michael is a highly-acclaimed creativity expert and author of the best-seller Thinkertoys (A Handbook of Business Creativity), ThinkPak (A Brainstorming Card Deck), Cracking Creativity (The Secrets of Creative Genius), and Creative Thinkering: Putting Your Imagination to Work.

Think Jar is honored to have ONST Creative contributing to the collective.  These guys are pros with passion and great style. They have won awards recently for their designs and work with a diverse client base.  If you need cutting edge design, marketing and branding, talk to these guys.

Paige consults, designs, facilitates and leads workshops & innovation labs around complex challenges. She brings deep knowledge of participatory research methodologies and has diverse experiences with facilitating human-centred and systemic design approaches.

Paul Freeman is one of the rare individuals doing innovative work at the intersection of Art and human services.  In addition to being an internationally known, independent artist, Paul Freeman is the Artistic Director of the Nina Haggerty Centre for the Arts, an art centre for artists with developmental disabilities in Edmonton, Canada. 

Peter Cook leads Human Dynamics and The Academy of Rock, a creativity and innovation management consultancy. Business and Organisation Development, Training and Coaching plus keynotes which blend leading ideas on business with the power of music, be it rock, jazz or classical. Peter has delivered conference keynotes and masterclasses to some of the world’s top businesses and organisations.

Piero Scaruffi received a degree in Mathematics (summa cum laude) in 1982 from University of Turin, where he did work in General Theory of Relativity. For a number of years he was the head of the Artificial Intelligence Center at Olivetti, based in Cupertino, California.

Rebecca is driven by a curiosity about how we cultivate communities where everyone is valued and belongs.

A “career path” is sometimes easier to explain in retrospect.  After studying psychology at McGill and Cornell, Bob rode the 60’s wave into his first gig as a professional hippie, interpreting his generation to the Government of Canada as a consultant on social policy.