Vancouver Island Facilitator
Facilitated planning, leadership and team sessions the length of Vancouver Island.
We create sessions that are greater than the sum of their parts, guided by award-winning facilitators.
- 110,000+people facilitated globally
- Award-winningfacilitators
- Sooke to Port Hardyin person, virtual or hybrid
We design sessions that leave teams with shared clarity, specific commitments, and the momentum to follow through.
Trusted by teams across the public, private and non-profit sectors
Vancouver Island
One island, one highway, and a lot of distance
Positive Impact facilitates strategic planning, leadership development, team retreats, and change management for organizations across Vancouver Island. Sooke to Port Hardy is around five hundred kilometres on essentially one road, and any organization with sites the length of it plans around that fact whether it means to or not.
If your team sits in one city, our Victoria and Nanaimo pages go into more detail on those markets. This page is for organizations whose footprint is the Island itself: health and education bodies, First Nations organizations, forestry and marine employers, and regional teams whose people are spread from Sooke to Port Hardy.
What we do
The areas we're called in for most
Every engagement starts with your context. If your challenge isn't listed here, ask us anyway.
Strategic Planning
An Island-wide plan has to work in a south Island office and in a community four hours up the highway with a very different economy. We facilitate the process so the people delivering it in those places help shape it rather than receive it.
Learn moreCommunication Training & COMS
Our own communication styles framework, giving teams a common language for how they each work. It travels well between a south Island head office and a site that only sees the leadership team twice a year.
Learn moreTeam Development & Team Building
Retreats, offsites and tailored sessions that build the trust and psychological safety strong teams depend on. There is good offsite country the length of the Island, most of it reachable by road.
Culture & Engagement
From vision and values work to culture shifts, we help turn shared purpose into commitments people live by, in organizations where the south Island and the north Island have genuinely different working realities.
Leadership Development & Executive Coaching
Hands-on coaching and development for managers and executives, often people promoted out of clinical, technical or operational roles who now lead the people doing that work.
Corporate Training
Participant-led training designed around your people, with tools that stay useful long after the session ends. Delivered site by site up the Island, or once to a group pulled in from all of them.
Every engagement we run is shaped around your team. Share what you're working on and we'll build the right session around it.
Share what you're working onHow We Facilitate
Sessions that turn conversation into a plan your team can actually run with
There's no prepared script. We guide the process, your team brings the expertise, and together we build toward a plan your people helped shape and will actually use.
Here that often means going to your people rather than gathering them: a half-day in Courtenay, a working session in Duncan six weeks later, a check-in after that. Facilitator-guided, participant-led, and spread across the year rather than compressed into one long day.
Get in Touch
Why work with us
Three ways teams here engage a facilitator
Every engagement is customizable, but most start in one of these shapes.
Quarterly or monthly
Ongoing Partnership
A facilitator who gets to know your team over time, so trust deepens and development compounds instead of starting fresh each session. Mostly virtual, anchored by one or two in-person days a year.
Best for: making development a habit rather than a one-off.
Ask about a partnershipMulti-day, immersive
Multi-Day Offsite
Extended session for strategic planning, leadership development or a culture shift. When we're flying east anyway, two days costs far less per day than one.
Best for: bigger decisions that need room to breathe.
Talk about an offsiteHalf-day to full-day
Single Workshop
A focused session built around one goal, whether that's a decision, a kickoff, or a skill like communications or building trust and psychological safety.
Best for: teams that know exactly what they need to work through.
Ask about a workshop
How we facilitate
A clear path from first call to follow-through
Each engagement follows a similar path, and includes the same care, from your first call to the work that carries on after we fly home.
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Discovery
A call to understand your context, your goals, and which communities need to be at the table.
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Design
Customized session design, built around your team, not a template.
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Facilitation
An experienced facilitator in the room or online, and in the room the day before.
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Materials
Materials and tools your team can keep using afterward.
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Follow-up
A summary with commitments and clear next steps.
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Support
Optional support to help momentum carry past the session.
Why facilitation?
How a team works together shapes everything it creates.
$100 Million
is the yearly cost for big companies for staff being in pointless meetings.
65%
of senior managers say that meetings keep them from completing their own work.
58%
of Americans would rather go to a doctor's appointment than attend a work meeting.
75%
of decision-makers feel that collaboration needs to be improved in their companies.
Forrester Research, 2021
Outcomes
What your team walks away with
Better decisions, made together
Decisions the whole room actually gets behind, instead of quiet disagreement that surfaces later in the parking lot.
Real buy-in
Because people helped shape the outcome, they leave genuinely invested in it, not just told what was decided.
Stronger team connection
The kind of trust and psychological safety that lets high-performing teams work well together, including the folks who only ever see each other on a screen.
Action that sticks
Clear commitments and ownership that carry into Monday morning, not just good intentions on the day.
Fresh thinking and better ideas
Space for your team's best thinking to surface, including ideas that might never have come up otherwise.
A record everyone can point at
A written summary of what was decided, who owns it, and by when. Useful when half the group has to brief a site that wasn't in the room.
Client stories
Real teams, real outcomes
These aren't all Vancouver Island engagements, and we won't pretend otherwise. They're the kinds of sessions we run and the outcomes teams point to afterward.
What our clients say
It was a pleasure to work with Will and Positive Impact. I was both inspired and empowered to co-deliver a meaningful offsite. Their positive incite into leadership performance and emotional resilience gave me clear direction and tactical tools I could apply to my workplace right away. I thoroughly look forward to working with Will again.
- Haley Daniels
Olympian and Motivational Speaker
Thanks for your incredible support, kindness, professionalism, and realness.
It was my sincere pleasure and privilege to work with you on our event.
You are a unique and special human, and I’m grateful that our paths crossed on this project, and look forward to the next time.
- Shauna Grinke, MBA, CPHR
Vice President - People and CultureThe workshop was an incredibly valuable experience for our team — the facilitator created an open, engaging environment that encouraged honest discussion and collaboration. The content was thoughtfully tailored to our team’s specific goals, making the session both relevant and actionable. We’re excited to continue partnering with Positive Impact to build on the great momentum sparked in this session.
- Shannon Charbonneau
Account Director
Treetop Marketing and Promotion Inc.
I’m leaving our session with a sense of optimism that I haven’t had in a while. It was time extremely well spent! I am sure that we all feel much closer and more connected.
- Participant
MDA Geointelligence Engineering Leadership SummitThe environment that was created made me feel comfortable to participate and collaborate with my colleagues. It was very well organized. I liked the outcome of the brainstorm sessions and warmup activities.
- ParticipantThe level of engagement and pace of the training was excellent. Like the fact that this workshop was trainer-guided, but participants lead!
- ParticipantFantastic facilitating most importantly Will understood when to let us talk and when to corral us back on track. Excellent value this afternoon.
- Engagement Workshop Participant
100% Satisfaction Guarantee.
We stand behind the quality of our work with complete confidence. If you're not fully satisfied with the results, we'll make it right.
Your trust matters more to us, and our guarantee acknowledges our belief that you deserve to feel confident in every investment you make with us. That's a standard we hold ourselves to, every time.
Ready to talk about your team?
Get in TouchAround the province
Where sessions happen, and what usually fits
The Island is long, and there is essentially one road up it. Any organization operating from Victoria to the north coast plans around that highway, and around the ferries at either end.
| Region | Organizations based there | Format that usually fits |
|---|---|---|
| Victoria and the south Island | Provincial ministries and agencies, technology, post-secondary, health, marine and defence, non-profits | In person. A strong public sector rhythm to the calendar. See our Victoria facilitator page for more on that market. |
| Nanaimo and the central Island | Health and education, municipal bodies, forestry and marine, mid-size employers | In person, and the ferry terminal that most mainland participants arrive through. See our Nanaimo facilitator page for more on that market. |
| The Cowichan Valley: Duncan, Ladysmith, Chemainus | Agriculture and wineries, forestry, health and education, First Nations governments and organizations, municipal bodies | In person. Often the practical middle ground for a group split between the south Island and Nanaimo. |
| The Comox Valley, Campbell River and the north Island | Health and education, forestry and aquaculture, municipal bodies, First Nations organizations, aviation and marine | In person, roughly half a day of driving from the south Island. Worth its own visit rather than a day trip, and comfortably done as two sessions on one trip. |
| Port Alberni and the west coast | Forestry and marine, tourism operators in Tofino and Ucluelet, First Nations governments, health and municipal teams | In person, though the drive over the pass is longer than the map suggests and seasonal on both ends. Tourism operators are effectively unavailable in summer. |
A local detail that matters
One highway, two ferry systems, and what that does to a session
Sooke to Port Hardy is around five hundred kilometres on essentially one road, and everything else on the Island hangs off it. For an organization with sites the length of the Island, that single fact shapes every decision about when and where people gather.
The practical effects are specific. Bringing your north Island people to the south costs them a day either side, which means a one-day session actually costs three days of their time, and they know it before they walk in. Anyone coming from the mainland is on a ferry, so a 9:00 start means a sailing before dawn or a hotel the night before. And the road is genuinely different in winter, which is why an Island-wide January session is a bigger ask than the same session in June.
So we will often suggest going to your people rather than gathering them. Running the same session twice, once in the south and once up-Island, frequently costs less than bringing everyone to one room and is a considerably better use of your people's time. When the group genuinely has to be together, Duncan or Nanaimo is usually fairer than the south Island, and we will say so even when the south is where most of the leadership sits.
Featured Workshops
Each of these runs in person, virtually, or as a hybrid, and on the Island the in-person option is usually affordable enough to be the default.
COMS Communication Styles
COMS is our own communication styles assessment, grounded in research and facilitated by our team. It gives your people a shared way to talk about how they each work, so different styles become an advantage instead of a source of friction.
It's especially useful where a south Island head office and up-Island operations have grown different working cultures. What reads as decisive in one place reads as dismissive in another, and without a shared vocabulary that gets filed under personality rather than distance.
Eight questions, one simple grid, and a reference the whole team can point at months later.
Learn more
Strategic Planning
This is where your team gets a real say in shaping and carrying out the organization's direction, landing on initiatives that actually move forward.
An Island-wide plan has to work in a south Island office and in a community four hours up the highway with a different economy. We facilitate the process so the people delivering it there help shape it rather than receive it.
A strategic plan is a living, breathing document. We stay involved as it plays out over the following months and years.
Learn more
5 Dysfunctions of a Team
This session takes a good team and helps make it excellent. We draw on Patrick Lencioni's well-known framework, approached through an appreciative inquiry lens that starts with what's already working.
It works particularly well as a series rather than a single day, which suits a team that cannot easily gather twice in a month. The five behaviours, trust, conflict, commitment, accountability and results, are all on the table, and a team gets to practise between sessions.
Your people walk away with shared language for how they work together, and a plan for moving forward that they built themselves.
Learn more
Our Core Team
Great content is only made better by great facilitators
Will Chambers
Founder & Facilitator
Award-winning facilitator and Founder of Positive Impact, with sessions delivered to tens of thousands of people. Will focuses on strategy, leadership, team dynamics and communication, turning concepts into clear, committed action.
More about Will
Lindsay Davis
Coach & Strategist
Award-winning coach and entrepreneurial guide, with experience spanning rural entrepreneurs in Africa to multimillion-dollar companies. Helps leaders focus on what matters most and build the resilience to anticipate challenges and move through them.
More about LindsayMichael Lorsch
Facilitator & Learning Consultant
Brings facilitation and learning design from theatre stages to executive boardrooms, including in-house work with lululemon. Blends mindfulness, relationship systems and human-centred design to keep people at the centre of every session.
More about Michael
Jason Maraschiello
Coach & Facilitator
Certified life and corporate coach, mindfulness and meditation teacher. Uses mindfulness and effective communication to help people set manageable goals, find work-life balance and build the support to follow through.
More about Jason
For work on Vancouver Island we assign one lead facilitator who travels for the session and stays with you through the follow-up, rather than handing you to a different person each time. Beyond the core team, we draw on a wider network of facilitators and subject-matter experts, matched to the goals, sector, and people of each engagement.
Looking for a specific market
Island pages and related reading
Two market pages and four guides that answer the questions most teams have before a first session.
- Market page Facilitation in Victoria Read the guide
- Market page Facilitation in Nanaimo Read the guide
- Wider footprint Facilitation across British Columbia Read the guide
- Getting ready How to prepare your team for a facilitated session Read the guide
- Hybrid sessions Making mixed in-person and remote sessions work Read the guide
- Honest advice When not to hire a facilitator, and what to do instead Read the guide
Frequently Asked Questions
Facilitation on Vancouver Island
Are your facilitators based on Vancouver Island?
We don't publish where our facilitators are based, and we'd rather be straightforward about that than vague. What matters for your engagement is that we work up and down the Island regularly and that travel is always quoted as a separate line item, so you can see exactly what it adds before you commit.
Should I be looking at this page or the Victoria or Nanaimo one?
If your team sits in one of those cities, go to that city's page, since each goes into more detail on the sectors and rhythms there. This page is for organizations whose footprint is the Island itself: health and education bodies, First Nations organizations, forestry and marine employers, and regional teams whose people are spread from Sooke to Port Hardy.
Our people are spread the length of the Island. Should we bring everyone to one room?
Often not, and we'll usually say so. Bringing your north Island people south costs them a day either side, so a one-day session actually costs three days of their time and they know it walking in. Running the same session twice, once in the south and once up-Island, frequently costs less and is a better use of everyone's time. When the group genuinely has to be together, Duncan or Nanaimo is usually fairer than the south Island.
Do you work north of Nanaimo?
Yes, and those communities have no page of their own so this is where they're covered. The Comox Valley, Campbell River and the north Island are roughly half a day of driving from the south, which makes them worth a dedicated visit rather than a day trip. Two sessions on one trip is the sensible shape. Port Alberni and the west coast take longer than the map suggests, and tourism operators out there are effectively unavailable through the summer.
What about people coming over from the mainland?
Build the ferry into the agenda rather than around it. A 9:00 start means an early sailing or a hotel the night before, so a 10:00 or 10:30 start often costs you nothing in working time and saves someone a very early morning. For a mixed Island and mainland group we'll sometimes suggest meeting in Nanaimo instead, since it's the shorter crossing.
What kinds of organizations do you work with here?
Leadership teams, boards, and departments across public, private, and non-profit organizations. On the Island that tends to mean health authorities and clinical teams, school districts and post-secondary, First Nations governments and organizations, forestry, marine and aquaculture, municipal and regional districts, tourism operators, and technology and professional services firms. Group size ranges from an executive team of eight to a leadership summit of sixty.
How does travel affect what a session costs?
Travel is quoted as a separate line item, so you can see exactly what it adds. For most of the Island it is mileage rather than flights and hotels, which keeps it modest. The far north Island and the west coast involve enough distance to be worth quoting separately, and we tell you that plainly rather than burying it.
How far ahead should we book?
Six to eight weeks is comfortable for an in-person session. That covers a discovery call, a session design built around your goals rather than a template, and any pre-work such as an anonymous survey or interviews. If you want a specific retreat venue in summer, start considerably earlier, because the room will be the constraint rather than us.
Let's talk about your team
Tell us what you're working through and where in the province your people are, and we'll tell you honestly whether facilitation is the right tool and what the session should look like.
Get in Touch
