Alice Fairfax: Women Who Move The City
Meet Alice Fairfax, Author & Workshop Leader!
Alice Fairfax, Photo by Roberto Gonzalez
ALICE FAIRFAX
Author & Workshop Leader
“If you can tell a good story, you can make a connection,” says Alice Fairfax. It’s a lesson she learned early on from moving all over the world. She arrived in Orlando in the late eighties, for her father’s final post at the Navy Base, now Baldwin Park. But after graduating from Rollins College as a theater major she discovered there were only two choices: move to a city where theaters were or start building theaters.
“It wasn’t noble, I just liked it here and I didn’t want to move anymore. Somehow it seemed easier to build something than to find something,” says Fairfax. She and other actors were determined to make Orlando a culturally vibrant city, where more artists would
want to make their home.
Along the way, she worked as an actor at Universal Studios and Walt Disney World, building a twenty-year career in audience participation. “Basically, I told stories that left gaps for the audience to add to the story.” It was in this incubator that she discovered the techniques for telling a great story and how to keep an audience engaged.
Her workshops were born out of the need she was seeing in Orlando’s nonprofits. She noticed incredible missions not getting attention because overwhelmed leaders didn’t have the tools to tell a good story. After the publication of her first book, “The Creative Life” she developed two workshops, one on creativity, helping leaders learn brainstorming techniques, and the other a full-day intensive on storytelling practices. Eventually, she connected with The Victory Cup Initiative and became the story coach for the nonprofit event that highlights ten nonprofit stories a year.
This November she’ll put those storytelling tools into more hands with the publication of her second book “Tell Your Story: Tools to Take You From a Tweet to a TED Talk”.
The world is her stage now. She delivers brand story workshops for the hospitality industry across the country and serves as the Senior Vice President of Ideation and Experience Design for MQDC, a destination development company in Bangkok, Thailand. Her passion for a vibrant culture in Orlando keeps her home base here, where she continues working with local nonprofits.
“It’s been a privilege to help build the culture here, but our work isn’t done. There are more stories to tell!”
