Talanoa Lab: Fostering a Transformative Culture of Feedback

Talanoa Lab: Fostering a Transformative Culture of Feedback

Pilot Offering for FY 25/26 by Bean Kaloni Tupou

📅 Saturday, October 18th, 2025

10am – 1:30PM PST

(Oakland, CA)

🎟 Limited to 25 participants

Sliding Scale Pricing:

$25 – Community Rate

$50 – Sustainer Rate

$75 – Supporter Rate

No one turned away for lack of funds

About the Workshop

What if feedback and the act of sharing our honest observations and perspectives wasn't something to avoid, but a practice of connection, space making and mutual care?

What if instead of bracing for criticism, we opened space for dialogue rooted in trust, curiosity, and cultural integrity?

At Talanoa Lab, we explore feedback as more than performance and social management; it’s a relational tool for community growth. One that, when practiced with intention, can heal ruptures, deepen collaboration, and foster a transformative culture of shared responsibility and belonging.

Fostering a Transformative Culture of Feedback is a 2 hour in-person pilot of the Talanoa Lab, a community-rooted space dreamed up by Bean Kaloni Tupou. It's a space to practice feedback as a cultural and relational act of decoloization. We’ll explore feedback not as a tool for correction, control or power horading, but as talanoa: open, reciprocal, trust-filled dialogue that builds collective strength, rooted in growth.

Whether you’re a people manager, educator, artist, team lead, culture worker, community organizer, or you want to learn more acute communication skills; this workshop is for anyone curious about reimagining feedback as a tool for advocacy, transformation, confidence, and accountability in your life.

What We’ll Explore

• How feedback has the power to build or disrupt psychological safety in groups
• Strategies for feedback that strengthen interpersonal trust and mutual respect

• Tools to foster a growth-oriented, feedback-rich organizational culture
• How committing to a practice of feedback can help decentralize power & ownership
• Ways to make feedback more grounded, decolonial, and care-centered

What to Expect

• Interactive exercises
• Scenario rewriting and person reflection
• Real-world practice
• Rich group discussions and storytelling
• A communal, culturally grounded learning space

Facilitated by Bean Kaloni Tupou

Bean Kaloni Tupou (they/them) is a mixed-race Tongan musician, aspiring culture strategist, operations leader, and lifelong Bay Area community arts organizer currently based in Oakland. With over 15 years of experience building people-centered infrastructure across the Bay Area music & art scenes, grassroots collectives, and community spaces, Bean brings a uniquely grounded, refreshing and relational approach to systems change.

Influenced by an Indigenous diasporic context, Bean’s work is rooted in the belief that feedback, when practiced with care and integrity, can be a pathway to self-determination, healing, and collective liberation.

Their facilitation is shaped by years of worker training, people operations, cultural assessment, infrastructure-building, and decolonial strategy. They hope to make Talanoa Lab a culmination of their lived experience, ancestral inheritance, creative process, and vision for a more relational, reciprocal way of working and being together.

Host or Publisher Bean Tupou