U nexpected Virtual Tours offers #1 rated virtual team building events, featured in the New York Times, Forbes, and the Guardian.
Our mission is to tell unexpected stories that matter. We are former attorneys and executives and passionate storytellers who care about building better teams.
We have built radically creative team building events since 2015 for the world’s largest companies.
We can’t wait to get your team bonding, laughing, and connecting.
Jennifer is usually seen as the adventurous one in her food choices and she enjoys helping others step outside of their comfort zone and discover things they never imagined they'd like, or even try. Originally from Chicago, but having called Atlanta home for many years, the world's busiest airport makes it convenient for Jennifer to indulge her passion for travel. During the day, she advocates for underserved communities, developing programs that help them gain access to justice. As an Unexpected Virtual Tour guide, she participates in community building in a different way, sharing unexpected untold stories and hidden gems to unite people and bring them together.
Akila McConnell is the founder and owner of Unexpected Virtual Tours. She has also had many jobs: attorney, accountant, journalist, and culinary historian. Unexpected Virtual Tours is the culmination of years spent attending (often lousy) team building events and thinking about how team building can and should be better.
Akila is passionate about team cohesiveness and creating radically inventive events that bring people together through powerful storytelling, history, food, and fun.
Akila grew up in Alabama and has lived in Atlanta for almost 20 years. In between, she spent three full years traveling across the world. Akila spends most of her free time reading biographies and cooking with her two micro-foodies.
Emily is a comedic actress, originally from Florida. She developed a deep love for the South after spending her college years at Florida State University, only 40 minutes from the Georgia border! From there, she moved to the west coast for 3 years to build her acting network in Los Angeles, but the South kept calling. It was something about the Southern hospitality and the incredible food that made her want to head back East.
From a young age, Emily remembers helping her mother making holiday treats from treasured family recipes, like her grandmother's coveted white fudge recipe. She believes food has a way of bringing people together and making us feel connected with our past. Now she is so excited to share her combined love of theater, comedy, and great cuisine through storytelling and hospitality events with Unexpected Virtual Tours.
Kevin Saunders was born and raised in Maryland, right outside Washington D.C. He relocated to Atlanta 5 years ago to further his acting career and has become a huge advocate for Georgia filmmaking. Georgia is one of the busiest filming locations in the world, so it only made sense to transition here. But Kevin has fallen in love with the city and all it has to offer even outside the film industry. Kevin is full of energy and fun and can't wait to work with your teams.
Kristin Storla is a native Georgia peach. Brought up in Marietta, college in Columbus, and now here in Atlanta, Kristin has stayed close to home for the ever-evolving food and entertainment scene. Kristin found the perfect balance of mixing her two passions, good food and even better people, as a Storyteller.
Not just a foodie, Kristin works as a freelance actor and fight director. She’s worked with local companies such as The Shakespeare Tavern, Out of Box, Sh!t-Faced Shakespeare, and The Center for Puppetry Arts BUT her favorite roles have always been ones where she can eat on stage! Her dream in life is to host a competitive cooking tv show.
Joy Warren lives up to her name because she exudes joy in life, food, and people. She is an inspirational author of the recently published youth inspirational book “Kingdom Star”, and singer/songwriter from Virginia where she attended Hampton University. As a musician, she has worked with Grammy Award-winning producers and artists from all over the country. However, she attributes the majority of her passion and growth as a person to her time serving in her family’s church as worship leader and youth pastor for a combined total of 18 years. Joy also founded the local social activism organization called The iForgive Movement, a movement to help relieve injustice through the simplicity and foolishness of forgiveness.
Joy grew up in Virginia Beach and now lives in Atlanta, GA. She enjoys meeting new people, and making people laugh and feel loved, because hospitality is not just a southern thing: it’s a way of life!
Community is our most powerful resource and Dean Link makes it the center of his personal life and professional communications. Dean attended the University of Texas at Austin and fell in love with the Live Music Capital of the World and the surrounding Silicon Hills. He developed a tenet based on evoking positive emotions and a sense of shared culture while working in marketing communications and training development for Fortune 100 technology firms. His love of the arts then led him to create social media content and marketing campaigns centered around community for top music festivals & their artists. Dean feels passionate about supporting the goals of Diversity Equity and Inclusion initiatives and believes they are crucial managerial strategies for creating sustainability while truly serving every stakeholder. "It feels so good to produce an event that transfers the concept of the other to the historically cruel and fearful while allowing every attendee to feel a part of something greater than themselves.
Arielle Stott grew up traveling to historic sights throughout the South and she never stopped being a tourist. Even on her days off, you can find her walking around Atlanta neighborhoods trying to learn more about their rich history and current revival. Her background is in art and she's an avid reader. She's always happy to recommend local museums and nightlife spots.
Chris Chamberlain is a food, drink, and travel writer based in Nashville, Tennessee, where he has lived his entire life except for four years in California where he studied liberal arts at Stanford University and learned how to manipulate chopsticks. He likes beer, bourbon and bacon but isn’t fanatical about any of them.
Jennifer loves connecting with people through food and stories! She enjoys learning and exploring new places and trying local foods. She has traveled to over 30 countries with plans to visit more. Though she’s lived in several places, Atlanta is home. She graduated from the University of Georgia and later earned her Culinary degrees from the Art Institute of Atlanta and her MBA from the University of Maryland Global Campus. Jennifer’s favorite part of sharing stories that matter with Unexpected Atlanta and Unexpected Virtual Tours is the impact it makes when people want to hear more and know more and share their own personal stories.
Paris Weeden is a multidisciplinary artist hailing from New York City and now based in Atlanta! She is passionate about all things performing arts, storytelling, and FOOD! As a graduate of an HBCU (Howard University) she learned there is so much more to every story than what is read in history books, and she finds purpose in her work/art through illuminating untold stories! She enjoys bringing people together and what better way to do that than through stories and food!
Unexpected Virtual Tours’ mission is to tell unexpected stories that matter.
DEI is not a check mark at our company but rather the core of what we do and the foundation of every single event we build.
We are fiercely anti-racist and passionate about being an intentionally inclusive company.
As a company that specializes in DEI team building, it is imperative that we walk the walk. We do so in a number of ways:
Virtual team building with on-location guides and delish foodie gift boxes
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