Global Service Leadership

Dreamfish enabled over 80 professionals to do meaningful innovative service projects, and through learning reflections about their service, learn about global leadership and collaboration. The learning journeys were often transformative, and challenging. Dreamfish challenged mental models about organizations and leadership. Professionals stretched to learn across disciplines of social science, technology and art, beyond their domains of comfort. 

To provide insight into the transformative experience of service learning, here are three extraordinary individuals, who served in coaching, mentorship and teaching roles.

Organizational Consultants as Dreamfish Fellows
Most of the professionals in Dreamfish came from the field of organizational and leadership development. They came to Dreamfish for a service learning project. Dr. Linda Crafts is such an individual, with decades of management experience at GE, an MBA and a PhD in Organizational Development. 

Linda has been of great service in her Dreamfish journey.  Linda first volunteered as a trainer in the Appreciative Inquiry training project as a way to advance embodied methodology in strategic planning. From 2008-2012, Linda served as a Dreamfish board member, and a volunteer in several operations projects. Linda currently is the mentor of two Dreamfish internship graduates in Kenya. She and Dana, her spouse, have donated generously to Dreamfish over the years, and now are sponsoring the education of her mentees through university.

Dreamfish Artist Residency

Imraan Osman, a Tanzanian designer, served as Artist in Residence for the first month at Dreamfish Place, Nairobi. He served the role of inspiring Dreamfish members to design with a relational mind. Along the way, he made  art and furniture from recycled trash, get internet connection in our remote location, taught design skills, taught Indian cooking, and made marketing materials. To the left is a slideshow of his residency.

Dreamfish Technologist Residency


Dreamfish provided technologists with expertise in social software, with opportunities to learn across discipline, to learn about the human side of collaboration. 

The slideshow on the left depicts the residency of Grant Bowman, Technologist in Residence at Dreamfish, Nairobi in 2011. Grant's service learning journey was intensive. During his full-time tenure, Grant  trained and mentored Dreamfish Leadership Interns, while co-leading the Community Tech project with Tiffany von Emmel. He improved the infrastructure at Dreamfish Place, led educational events at iHub to promote Ubuntu as an open source project, and advanced One Laptop Per Child project in Kenya.