Toronto, Canada—The doors to the conference venue opened and delegates started finding their seats, surprised to find a band already revved up onstage, and what looked like African drums on every chair in the cavernous ballroom of the Toronto Hilton.
“What are we supposed to do with these drums?” Toronto-based journalist Marites Sison and I wondered, as we got settled.
It didn’t take long for us to find the answer, and it was an exhilarating, invigorating one. For the next 45 minutes or so, we and the hundreds of other journalists who came to Toronto for the conference, found ourselves pounding away at the drums and swaying to the rhythm of the Drum Café, a group that has been working conferences like this, eliciting audience participation in a unique and energizing team building experi
ence.
“It is our job to demonstrate the importance of working as a team, playing to the same beat, listening to each other, and how individual roles/rhythms, large or small, impact the entire organization,” said the Drum Café in the flyers we found in our seats.
And so it was that Drum Café lifted the spirits of the delegates, 550 from 44 countries, who came to take part in the four-day Global Investigative Journalism Conference. Our spirits definitely needed lifting because, as keynote speaker Lowell Bergman, award-winning
