Designed to fit the retreat—not take it over.

The experience can be used as a creative reset, a shared group moment, or part of a deeper reflective program.

Participants work with their hands, make their own choices, and leave with something tangible they created themselves.

A participatory experience that fits the destination.

Guests are not watching a demonstration from the sidelines. They are making something themselves.

For visitors who seek activities they can participate in, USE offers a guided, beginner-friendly soapstone carving workshop. Guests shape and finish a small piece to take home, rather than simply watching an artisan at work.

This is a contemporary hands-on creative experience, not a traditional or Indigenous cultural interpretation program. The experience can be placed inside resort programming, destination itineraries, special events, conferences or seasonal visitor programs.

A clean handoff for the planner.

You bring the guests and the schedule. We bring the experience, facilitate it, and remove it when we are finished.

For curious travellers seeking something active and memorable, guests are guided through shaping a piece of soapstone themselves. This is a contemporary creative workshop—not an Inuit art workshop or Indigenous cultural experience.

The core formats make it easy to choose the amount of time available rather than redesigning the itinerary around the activity.

The work happens in the doing.

People sit down with a piece of stone, a simple process and enough guidance to begin. The task is tangible, individual and shared at the same time.

There is room for conversation, focus and creativity without asking participants to perform for the group.

Everyone starts on equal footing: the same stone, the same tools, whatever their title. We have run it for 40 leaders at the AMA Leadership Conference at Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise and for a 25-person staff team at Mount St. Francis Retreat Centre in Cochrane.

Learning through making.

Students make choices, work through a process and create a tangible piece of their own.

The emphasis is on participation and possibility rather than producing identical results.

Give people a reason to sit down and make something.

USE can be delivered as a community program where participants arrive with no previous experience and leave with a finished piece.

The host provides the people and the space. USE handles the hands-on experience.

No group booking required.

Public workshops are the direct-to-participant side of USE: a hosted time and place where people can simply register and take part.

Public sessions run on published dates at selected venues. Use the booking calendar to view available places and pay online when the current schedule is available; no event-planning enquiry is required.

Looking for something different from another paint night? Carving stone is something most people have never tried. People often leave saying they never thought they could do it.

Start with the outcome and the constraints.

Tell us who the group is, what the surrounding program looks like and how much time is available.

We will identify whether one of the standard USE formats fits or whether the delivery needs to be adapted.

A complete experience in a tighter window.

GOAC Express keeps the core USE idea—hands on stone, simple guidance, individual choice—but uses a compact project and tighter facilitation.

It is useful for conferences, schedules with narrow activity blocks, and groups that need a meaningful experience without a full 90-minute session.

The standard USE format.

GOAC is the experience most groups can drop directly into a conference, corporate day, retreat, destination program or special event.

Participants work through the carving process with sandpaper and guidance from the USE team. The format is structured enough to keep the room moving and open enough for every finished piece to be different.

For groups that want more than the 90-minute core.

GOAC Extended creates space for a larger project, additional shaping and a less compressed pace.

It can stand on its own as a half-day creative experience or become the hands-on centrepiece of a longer team or retreat program.

Creativity develops differently when people get to come back.

Studio is designed as a sequence rather than a single session. Participants have time to work with a larger project and build confidence across multiple visits.

Our scheduled Studio program also welcomes adult participants at partner galleries, including Route 22. Other recurring partnerships can be tailored to the venue and group.

The point is not to teach everyone to make the same thing.

Michael combines facilitation, creativity and experiential learning to create experiences that people remember.

USE isn't designed around simply teaching people to carve. It's designed around creating an experience that works for the organization booking it—and is meaningful for the people participating.

The stone is the medium. The experience is what happens when people stop watching, start making and discover that there is more than one right way forward.