Customized Seminars, Trainings & Keynotes
Thousands of participants from educational, government, corporate, and social service agencies have taken StirFry’s trainings and seminars. We are recognized internationally as having one of the most outstanding cross-cultural and communications training programs for managers, supervisors, H.R., admin executives, education professionals, social services leaders and agencies. (See our selected client list)
The following is a sampling of popular keynote, seminar and training titles and descriptions that our company offers. This list is meant to showcase what is possible. Any of the selections below can be adjusted to meet the specific hopes and needs of your group. For example, the workshop title “Responding to a Discriminatory Incident on Campus” can easily be adjusted to “Responding to a Discriminatory Incident in the Workplace.” Our company can also adjust the timeframe for many of these workshops to meet your specific needs. The possibilities are limitless. Contact us today for more information.
Cross Cultural Facilitation Skills for Leaders- Four Part Program:
Part 1- Creating Authentic and Transformative Relationships through Listening and Responsive Communication Techniques
Part 2- Exploring the Roots of our Disconnection and Ways to Rebuild and Restore Trust
Part 3- Mindful Techniques that Create Lasting and Adaptive Inclusionary Practices
Part 4- Advanced Facilitation Techniques that Promote Empathy, Compassion and Community
A National Conversation on Race: Lee Mun Wah & Honorary/Special Guests on Stage followed by a Community Workshop
An Unfinished Conversation on Campus: Keynote, Faculty/Staff & Student
Contact Us to learn how we can create a customized package for your company, group, or organization.
Booking an Event: Common Questions
We have a variety of diversity programs as well as those that we customize to meet your needs.
Our most popular workshops are our Film Presentations. Each of these is quite stimulating and educational. We encourage you, however, to also plan for follow-up seminars/trainings to allow for continued dialogue and sharing. Also, if you have any facilitators, managers, or administrators that would like to enhance or practice their communication/diversity skills, this is a great opportunity for your staff to take our Intensive Training Programs dealing with diversity conflicts and issues.
We have a catalogue of all our seminars and trainings; if interested, please ask the Director of Seminars to send you one.
Most companies have not participated in our type of workshops, so you have company. We customize our workshops to begin at the level of your agency and employees. We will never sell you any programs that you don’t need or want.
Our Director of Seminars will walk you through each step. We also have a checklist, audience assessment, and publicity materials that will help you have a successful diversity experience.
Our Trainers have countless exercises to meet the changing needs of each agency and audience. We have a diverse pool of trainers that represent a cross section of issues and ethnic groups.
In addition, our Director of Seminars will guide you through the contractual, travel, and technical supports that will be needed. The Director, Lee Mun Wah, and our other facilitators are available to answer any of your questions both before and after the event.
This is a very common concern amongst many companies that have a limited budget. StirFry Seminars makes every attempt to customize our workshops and trainings to meet the budgetary concerns and limitations of our clients. We are very receptive to working with you and your agency to be sure that our product and services are available and accessible to everyone.
What we recommend is perhaps combining a seminar or training with other agencies so you can share expenses and planning. If you look on our website’s Calendar page, you can synchronize your schedule to coincide with the dates in which we are scheduled to be in your area to save on transportation and accommodation costs. In addition, when we present a workshop and/or training, we offer a 50% discount on all of our films and products.
We try very hard at StirFry Seminars to work within your budget and to help customize the exact kind of workshop that will meet your budgetary needs and restraints. We strongly encourage you to call our Berkeley office if you are financially restrained in purchasing our films, products, and workshops.
We also often recommend our Trainer of Trainers series, which teaches trainers and potential facilitators the skills that they will need to lead groups, mediate conflicts, and help others with basic skills such as listening and responsive techniques for effective communication.
If you have just completed a workshop on racism using The Color of Fear, then we recommend our film on sexism, Last Chance for Eden – Part 2. Last Chance for Eden – Part 1 (on racism) is also an excellent follow-up after The Color of Fear because it includes men and women talking together about racism and sexism.
Our Film Guides (available to supplement Last Chance for Eden 1 and Color of Fear 1) are available through our Film Department. The Film Guides provide process questions that coincide with particular scenes in our films. These questions help stimulate group discussions and are framed within a broader cultural perspective. The process questions and exercises were written by Lee Mun Wah and a team of diversity trainers.
The StirFry Seminars Seminar Catalog is also available, and lists all of our seminars and types of trainings, in addition to descriptions of our Berkeley, California, workshops and trainings on Unlearning Racism, Unlearning Sexism, Film Facilitation, and Mindful Facilitation.
We have facilitators that specifically work with youth on diversity issues. We also find that high school students are quite prepared to sit through our films and feel engaged. The Color of Fear 2: Walking Each Other Home, was created for high school students. The pace is faster and the dialogue is enhanced with more contemporary music. It is also a shorter than the original film – about 50 minutes in length.
We believe that teaching skills to our audiences is essential to practicing diversity work. We teach participants ways of listening, responding and noticing what is spoken and what is not. Throughout the seminar we point out different communication techniques and ask the audience to practice them throughout the session. In that way, when the participants finish our seminars, they have a vast array of skills that will apply to their particular work and employee environments. We also provide our popular “Nine Healthy Ways to Communicate” cards to all the participants upon request.
Lee Mun Wah has written countless manuals on communication and facilitation techniques. One of his most famous writings is “The Art of Listening”. StirFry Seminars offers trainings on facilitation and film techniques as well as a 3-Day Intensive Trainings Program for Managers, Facilitators, and Trainers.
Each of our films is appropriate for learning about diversity issues and provides different insights and unique cultural and social perspectives.
Stolen Ground offers audiences insight into the experiences and perceptions of Asian Americans. It demystifies the “model minority” stereotypes and replaces it with a more realistic and personal cultural portrayal. People of all ethnicities find Stolen Ground illuminating because of the remarkable similarities to their own racial experiences.
The Color of Fear is the most well known of our films. It is an intimate portrayal of what many people of color go through on a daily basis. It is confrontational, intimate and contains extremely honest dialogue. This film provides great stimulus for audience discussion. For many EuroAmericans, this film is their Racism 101 course. For many people of color this film is a perfect opening to talk about their personal experiences and the effect that racism has had on their families and communities.
The Color of Fear 2: Walking Each Other Home is the sequel. It helps answer the questions about how the men responded emotionally to each other, as well as what EuroAmericans in general can do to in their struggle against racism. The format was adapted for high school students. It moves at a faster pace and has more music to keep the energy flowing. It is a good primer for those unaccustomed to talking about racism.
The Color of Fear 3: Four Little Beds features eight men from the original cast talking frankly about the painful struggle of growing up gay in a heterosexually oriented society. In addition, a ten year retrospect is included with Roberto Almanzan and David Lee talking about gay marriages and other issues that are facing our communities, as we struggle to deal with this extremely important and relevant issue.
Last Chance for Eden Part 1, is about nine men and women talking about racism in two weekend sessions. What makes this film different from our previous films, is the inclusion of women, more examples of facilitation interventions, video diaries from each participant, withhold sessions, and a question & answer period between whites and people of color that is revealing and deeply moving.
Last Chance for Eden Part 2 is an illuminating and educational film, which describes issues of sexism in intimate, family, workplace, and societal contexts. This is a must-see film for men and women both; for women who doubt the validity of their feelings and responses to their treatment by and experiences with men; and for men regarding their issues of control and the acceptability of emotional expression.
Last Chance for Eden Part 3: For those of you who have viewed Last Chance for Eden Parts 1 & 2, this film is a perfect follow-up to the whole series. It is focused on the biographies of each of the cast members – as they struggled to understand what had happened to them in their families and eventually, their journey towards finding a healthy life as an adult.
The Four Hour Seminar is useful for those agencies that have a limited time schedule. The Four Hour Seminar includes the showing of one of the above films, time for dyad discussions, and a group processing time. What the Seven Hour Seminar offers is more time for questions, answesr, team building exercises, the closing circle, and next steps declarations. Our experience has been that the Seven Hour session is more effective and allows the most time for debriefing and dealing with underlying issues. Also, the Seven Hour session allows for adequate facilitation of any conflicts that might arise.
Process Questions
We believe that getting upset about discrimination is not only healthy, but also important for healing and understanding. Our trainers are experienced in dealing with a wide range of emotions such as anger, hurt, grief, and shame.
We work with audiences not only to hear the pain and struggles of those who have experienced being discrimination, but also to listen and respond to such pain. It is our belief that conflict is a natural and inevitable part of any intimate relationship.
To build healthy relationships, we need to work though, and not avoid, conflict and power issues. The question is not whether it will happen, but rather if we are willing to stay in the room and come to a place where we can understand and accept each other’s differences.
Yes, there certainly are. We have identified these two issues, as well as many others. The reason we focus on these two is because they are often the most pervasive issues dividing the country and in the workplace. Many times when we don’t want to talk about racism, we switch over to sexism. When we don’t want to talk about sexism, we switch over to racism or any other ism. Our company tries to focus on one ism at a time so that a consistent dialogue can take place and questions can be asked and answered by those who are victimized by that particular issue.
Denial often has a lot to do with fear. In our workshops we create an environment where participants can develop authentic and trusting relationships with each other. Someone once said, “The truth is always there, saying it out loud – that’s the hard part.”
We work to to dispel the myth that silence and avoidance make for safer work environments. On the contrary, they usually promote fear and are often the roots for many lawsuits and EEO complaints.
Our exercises are designed to allow participants to feel safe, yet intimate enough to have an authentic and honest dialogue. Safety is created by being more open and working through our differences and fears. The lack of safety comes when we are unwilling to listen. Issues of difference do not go away because we stay quiet. They dissipate and are resolved when we are willing stay in the room and to listen to each other.
One of the ways we stimulate meaningful and personal conversation is by having the participants engage in dyad and small discussion groups. We also teach the basics in communication, rather than have participants debate and compete over the “rightness” of each other’s opinions.
Another method is letting people talk about their resistances. Letting them vent about past workshops and the effect it had on them. Someone once said that the best way to tame a wild bull is to let it have a wider field. Interesting and effective. The more we resist, the greater the resistance. The more we listen, the greater possibilities for an open dialogue in which learning and change can take place.
No one is the founder of racism or sexism. What we are responsible for is the cure: looking at ourselves and our own stereotypes. We often feel that racism and sexism are not about hate, but rather about fear. Lee Mun Wah often says, “I am a recovering racist and sexist. That doesn’t mean that I’m a horrible person; what it does mean is that I’ve been acculturated since I was very young to see particular groups in stereotypical ways. My work is to realize how that permeates how I see others and how I treat them on a daily basis both at work, in my community, and in my relationships.” What pertains to all of us is that we may not directly engage in racist or sexist behaviors, but we may still indirectly benefit from the oppression of others.
Too often we assume because someone is emotional, that they are out of control. Showing emotion is a natural and healthy part of all relationships. When we allow people to share their personal stories and experiences, what we find is that they feel relieved. Not necessarily because a solution has been found, but because they can finally share with someone who believes them and is open to understanding what they have gone through. That is the secret of closure, starting from the beginning – acknowledging what they have experienced and the effect that it has had on them. Through believing them and supporting their reality and needs, the journey towards closure begins. If we are ever going to heal from racism and sexism and all the other isms, we need to be willing to hear the stories- all the stories, however hard, because they, too, are a part of the healing and learning.
Quite often, people don’t want to talk in front of a large group, but will do so with one other person. That is why we have the audience break up into dyads (groups of 2) by choosing someone who is different from themselves. That way they can have the privacy and the attention of one other person who they don’t know and of their own choosing.
Corporate Trainings
- For large or small groups, managers, sales personnel, etc.
- Tailored to your own corporate culture
- Hands-on practice of concrete communication skills
Educational Institutions
- For staff, educators, and/or students
- Tailored to your own campus issues
Governmental Agencies
- For
- Tailored to your own agency issues
Social Services/Non-Profits
- For
- Tailored to your own agency issues