Hosts

Let us introduce you to some extraordinary humans.

Connection is joy for us. It’s also, more or less, our life’s work.

Why We’re Here

Hi, we’re Jenn McRae and Anna McClean.

We’re the pals and co-creators bringing The Deep End to life.

We met working on The Self Care Project in 2012, a response to watching people in our communities care deeply about everything except themselves.

Back then, we thought better self-care might be enough.

We’ve since learned the bigger, truer, thing: you cannot self-care your way out of an environment built to fracture your attention and burn you out.

So now we’re asking a new question:

What conditions enable human thriving?

The Deep End is our answer.

(Or at least one of them.)

Your Hosts · 01

Jenn McRae

Jenn McRae — Co-Creator and Host

Selected experience

Co-founder SFU Change Lab and RADIUS Fellowships · 2X leader of group train tours to Portland · Founder Urban Worker Skill Share · Started Night Markets at Gibsons Public Market

Jenn has spent more than twenty years turning big ideas about how we might live and work into things people can actually experience together.

Jenn is a connector by nature and a host by instinct. She notices who should know each other, what a room needs, and when an idea is ready to become something real. She loves the moment a collection of people begins to feel like a community, and has spent much of her career learning how to help that happen.

Three reasons Anna loves Jenn

  1. She is relentlessly curious. Jenn asks the kind of questions that make you think differently. She’s actually, fully fascinated by people, ideas, and how the world works.
  2. Her ideas are deep and wide and many. She walks around them, interrogates them, introduces them to other ideas, and watches what happens next.
  3. She makes people feel invited. Ten minutes in or ten years in, Jenn has a way of making you feel like you belong.
LinkedIn Instagram Substack

Your Hosts · 02

Anna McClean

Anna McClean — Co-Creator and Host

Selected experience

MEd · Former Director of Innovation Design, BC Public Service · Nearly 20 years in facilitation, learning design, and community-building

Anna has spent nearly twenty years asking a version of the same question: what happens when you gather people around something meaningful, build the right conditions, and give them enough time to become a community?

The forms have varied wildly… summers on the land with youth leaders. A cross-country training tour in a rented car. An island-based organizer bootcamp. A community-organizing program that trained more than 1,000 people across BC.

And while they might be different places and different communities, the same instinct is at the heart: build conditions where people feel connected, capable, and ready to do something meaningful together.

Three reasons Jenn loves Anna

  1. She’s high integrity. Her actions are her values, and her values are her actions.
  2. She is deeply at ease in herself, which seems to be part of this kind of magic she has where people somehow become more of themselves in her presence.
  3. Her. Bookshelf. Is. Amazing. She is widely read (read: interesting) but never above it. True crime and reality TV sit comfortably beside nonfiction bestsellers and Big Ideas. There are no pretenses with Anna.
LinkedIn

The People We’re Lucky to Host With

The people we’re lucky to host with.

When we started telling our people about The Deep End, the response was almost always the same: a big yes.

Some of the most enthusiastic yeses also happened to come from three of the most talented hosts we know. We asked them to co-host with us because we trust them to create the kind of week we’d want to attend ourselves.

Each brings something the others don’t. Together, we’re making something none of us could alone.

Co-Hosts · 01

Stina Brown

Stina Brown — Co-Host

Selected experience

Founder, EnACT Collective · Co-produced and hosted Hollyhock’s Social Change Institute · 19+ years in systems change, visual practice, and retreats

Jenn recently started calling Stina her Work Auntie.

At a formative, in-over-her-head stage of Jenn’s career, Stina walked beside her saying variations of ‘yes, you fucking can’, in words, actions, and shared relationships. Fifteen years later, they’re still weaving in and out of each other’s lives.

We love Stina because

  1. Her mind is EXPANSIVE. Gorgeous. Generative. Interesting. Nonlinear. Fast. Kind. Deep. She sees connections other people miss, asks questions you didn’t know needed asking, and somehow turns complexity into possibility.
  2. She makes the wildly imaginative useful. Stina has pioneered visioning exercises with names like the Super Social Vision Portal. She’ll happily venture into the strange, emergent, nonlinear edges of an idea, but can also bring it back to earth as something people can actually work with.
  3. She’s brave and makes bravery easier for the rest of us. She isn’t afraid to be different, try something new, or ask the uncomfortable question.
LinkedIn Instagram

Co-Hosts · 02

Devon Carr

Devon Carr — Co-Host

Selected experience

Expedition captain, chef, and photographer · Co-founder, Convergence Studio · Visual and expedition work spanning 70+ countries and the wild BC coast

The first time Jenn and Devon talked, it was a phone interview for the RADIUS Fellowships program. Both of them were slowly pacing — him through a marina in Victoria, where he lived aboard a sailboat; her down the halls of the old BC Electric building in Vancouver.

Eleven years later they’ve swapped cities — Jenn in Victoria now, Devon in Vancouver — but you’ll still find them where they started: on the phone for hours, pacing and puttering, all the same.

We love Devon because

  1. He’s a photographer, and photography is a kind of attentional practice. Whatever Devon pays attention to gets more beautiful.
  2. Devon loves his people big and hard and wide and deep. And there are a lot of us. He’s a gravitational force.
  3. Renaissance Man is cliché, but for him it’s just… accurate? Maybe the honest modern translation is multipassionate. Chef. Sailor. Captain. Adventure guide. Intellectual. Artist. Entrepreneur. Advocate. Death doula. Sauna ambassador. He’s all of it, at once, and more.
Instagram Convergence Studio

Co-Hosts · 03

Kieren Britton

Kieren Britton — Co-Host

Selected experience

Founder, The Lady Alliance · Built and led a national outdoor community · Conflict, transition, and change practitioner at Summit Within

Two years ago, Kieren turned around from the passenger seat of a mutual friend’s car and introduced herself to Jenn with a smile you could only call high-wattage. She treated Jenn as if they’d been friends for a decade, because, as it turns out, that’s just her nature. Making people feel instantly familiar, at ease, and like they belong is one of her many gifts.

We love Kieren because

  1. The summer they met, she repeatedly volunteered to help Jenn set up 16-foot bell tents for the glamping company Jenn briefly owned — purely because she found it fun and liked hanging out. Ten-out-of-ten recommend having a friend like Kieren.
  2. She will casually repaint her entire kitchen at 2 p.m. because she noticed a scratch while doing dishes, on a break from writing a term paper, while also on the phone with her mom.
  3. She willingly goes into the hardest parts of life and comes back with insight and offerings that make everyone else’s life richer.
LinkedIn Instagram Summit Within Therapy Collective

The Work of Hosting

Between the five of us, we have gathered people on trains and islands, in classrooms and kitchens, on boats and on mountains. We have built cohorts, fellowships, retreats, expeditions, learning experiences, outdoor communities, shared meals and entered more than a few Super Social Vision Portals.

Across all of this, we’ve learned that good hosting is a particular kind of craft where, when it works, much of the work disappears.

As to how that particular magic happens, we think it might go something like this:

Introduce remarkable people.

Create conditions for them to feel at ease.

Get out of the way and watch what happens.

Best as we can tell, that is the work behind the work.

And if we do say so ourselves: what a group to do it with.

Oct 12, 2026 – Oct 16, 2026

Bring the work that has been waiting.

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