Creating Our Lives Together Study Group (Fall 2025)

Creating Our Lives Together is not your typical reading group.  It’s a weekly practice of building together. It’s a space for hope, creativity, and development. Here, we read with each other, share our experiences, and build community across generations, cultures, and backgrounds.

This fall, join Melissa and Desire for an exploration of two powerful books by Fred Newman:

• Let’s Develop! : A Guide To Continuous Personal Growth

• Performance of a Lifetime: A Practical-Philosophical Guide to The Joyous Life 

These texts challenge traditional psychology’s fixation on the self, diagnosis and solving problems, and introduce you to the collaborative, performatory and growthful practice called social therapeutics. Together, these books open the door to rich conversation and performance-based activities that help us go beyond ourselves and do what we don't know how to do.

Whether reading gives you anxiety or you consider yourself an expert reader, everyone is welcome.. We are multi-generational and multi-cultural, and we thrive when new voices join the conversation.

Come as you are. Bring a friend, a family member, or someone you know who’s searching for something more. Let’s read, create, and develop together.

Zoom Meeting Dates:

Tuesdays, 3:00pm-4:30pm Eastern US (UTC-4) - (Click links below to see the time of each session in your part of the world)

• September 30th, October 7th, 14th, 21st and 28th

Leader Biographies

Melissa Meyer is the Institute’s associate director and a social therapeutic coach. She is co-chair of the International Organizing Committee for Performing The World Happenings, a biannual virtual gathering that explores performance, play and improvisation as methods to help communities grow and create positive social change. She is currently a social therapeutic coach in three weekly Developing Across Borders groups -- spaces where people perform as world citizens, invent new ways of being and seeing, and produce new possibilities for each other and their communities.

Desire Wandan, the Institute's Media and Tech Producer, is a teaching artist, videographer and documentarian. Des was introduced to social therapeutics while a student at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, where he performed as a leader of the “Let’s Talk About It” group led by Barbara Silverman. He currently serves as tech producer (Z-Jay) and volunteer coordinator for ESI programs, and as multimedia content producer of short videos, documentaries and the “All Power to the Developing” podcast series. Passionate about Hip-Hop culture, he is an avid dancer and teaching artist in communities across New York.