AMSSA Webinar:
Mental Wellness & Community Collective Care
Thursday, June 11, 2020
The impacts of COVID-19 disproportionately affect vulnerable individuals and communities such as newcomers. A pandemic can be considered a collective trauma and some literature shows that living through a pandemic can increase rates of depressions, anxiety, domestic violence, and PTSD.
For newcomers who may have come from a background that included war, fear, uncertainty, and food instability, this can be an especially re-traumatizing time. There is a need to discuss how to support clients in a trauma-informed way while resisting burnout, compassion fatigue, and vicarious trauma – all in the time of a pandemic and with a focus on community-building and community collective care. In the face of a pandemic, there is a need to go deeper than the “self-care” we are normally prescribed and look at Community Collective Care and how we can support ourselves and our communities – and resisting burnout through our work
PAN Solidarity Groups: Belonging. Solidarity. Connection.
Pacific Aids Network will be hosting a series of online workshop sessions, for frontline service providers of PAN member organizations, with Clinical Supervisor/Instructor/Consultant Vikki Reynolds – PAN Solidarity Group: Belonging. Solidarity. Connection.
These online sessions will explore the importance of belonging, solidarity and connection in these challenging and uncertain times. Vikki works to bridge the worlds of social justice, activism and therapy. Some of you will be familiar with Vikki’s work around resisting burnout and some similar themes will be reviewed and discussed in these sessions as they relate to the COVID-19 situation. These sessions are not group therapy sessions, they are instructional in nature (a presentation followed by a dialogue) and participants are asked to come prepared to be active participants in the sessions (i.e. cameras enabled, active participation via the chat function of the webinar platform, and in some cases enabling your microphone for dialogue with Vikki).
We will be offering 3 sessions (all sessions will follow the same format and structure) at different times of the day as we know some of you are working shifts outside of the 9-5 paradigm. The dates for the 3 sessions are as follows:
Tuesday, April 28th – 2:00-3:30 PM
Tuesday, April 28th – 6:00-7:30 PM
Thursday, April, 30th – 10:00-11:30 AM
Postponed due to COVID-19
Centering Ethics in Group Supervision: Creating a Culture and Structuring Safety: A Supervision of Solidarity
Wood’s Homes, Parkdale Campus, Calgary
- consider how to promote dignifying and generative supervision groups for therapy and community work
- deconstruct “case consultation” norms that don’t serve clients or practitioners, and consider what a “Culture of Critique” that is generative, expansive, connected and dignified might offer.
- consider practices of structuring safety and creating relationships of respect and dignity which can promote a culture of accountability that generates useful and rich critique.
- share some exercises for creating intentional supervisory relationships.
- create cultures of accountability that invite critique that are a resistance against surveillance practices of supervision
- practice examples of “Living Supervision”, and creating “Solidarity Teams” to assist practitioners to work in alignment with our collective ethics
$300 CAD per registrant
Workshop enrollment limited to 25 (registration and received payment is necessary to guarantee your place)
Registration: Contact Debbie Baker
(Debbie.Baker@ucalgary.ca) at the Calgary Family Therapy Centre.
Payment in cash, check, or electronic transfer (no credit or debit cards).
Postponed due to COVID-19
Trauma & Resistance: Innovative Responses to Oppression, Violence and Suffering
March 26, 2020 – 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Santa Maria Goretti Centre 11050 90 Street
Edmonton, Alberta
In this experiential workshop, Vikki offers an alternative approach to work with ‘trauma’ from a decolonising, anti-oppression stance which focuses on the resistance of victims of violence and oppression. Honouring the wisdom of the people we work alongside with in their responses to trauma brings forward their agency and wisdom. Vikki will illustrate a witnessing approach to therapy using practice examples and struc-turing safety as the foundation of the work. She will share alternative understandings of ‘trauma’ that resist psychology and the helping professions’ normalizing practice of re-framing oppression, harm and suffering as personal deficit and disguising acts of re-sistance as trauma and pathology symptoms
Please send payment to / ninetta@shaw.ca
The Narrative Project ℅ #318 – 9507 101 Ave Edmonton AB T5H 4R1
*Buffet lunch provided (veg/gluten-free options) / *no cancellations
Postponed due to COVID-19
ACSW 2020 Annual Conference – Connect. Explore. Grow.
Keynote: Justice-Doing & Collective Resistance
Drawing on her experience in activism, Vikki Reynolds, a registered clinical counsellor, will present how she ties structural social justice work into her life. Vikki will address our collective commitment to justice-doing and our struggles that stem from an unjust world. How can we weave our collective resistance to structural oppression? We will look at our collective accountability to work in ways that resist replicating oppression and aim to deliver justice to the persons we work alongside, and to “walk our talk”. We will acknowledge the darkness of mean and hate-filled politics, and the suffering of “messed-with human beings” alongside luminous stories of everyday resistance. Threads from our community work, social movements, and the immeasurable outcomes of our work alongside persons struggling to keep a fingerhold on dignity combine to build our resistance.
Workshop: Justice-Doing & Collective Resistance: A Deeper Conversation
In this workshop, we will take a deeper look at the ideas and practices covered in the keynote presentation. Participants will be invited to connect with their own ethical stance and influences. We will examine collective ethics and how best to enact ethics as a path to sustainability and a way to resist the spiritual pain of encountering affronts to our collective ethics. We’ll explore how to create accountability to shoulder each other up, and create sustainability in the paid and unpaid work across our lifespan. We will consider what our work has meant for us, our hopes, and how all of this can help keep those we are walking alongside at the centre of our care.
Friday March 27
DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel
West Edmonton
Postponed due to COVID-19
Postponed due to COVID-19
Postponed due to COVID-19
Postponed due to COVID-19
Solidarity and Justice-Doing in Community Work and Therapy
London, Manchester and Edinburgh, May 2020
London: May 11 & 12 2020
£230 + VAT, 20% off for self-funders
Manchester: May 14 & 15 2020
£230 + VAT, 20% off for self-funders
Edinburgh: May 18 2020
£160 + VAT, 20% off for self-funders
This workshop is informed by a spirit of solidarity and social justice activism. Vikki will illuminate her stance for an ethic of Justice-Doing as a frame for community work and for therapy. She will consider the intersections, tensions and affinities between community work practice and social justice activism that encompasses centering ethics, doing solidarity, addressing power, fostering collective sustainability, critically engaging with language and structuring safety. We will engage with our own stances for ethical practice, and participate in a Solidarity Group with the intention of “walking our talk” and opening up our collective work to a hopeful skepticism that questions the ethics alive in our practice.
This workshop will help participants:
- Consider how to promote dignifying and generative supervision groups for therapy and community work.
- Deconstruct “case consultation” norms that don’t serve clients or practitioners, and consider what a “Culture of Critique” that is generative, expansive, connected and dignified might offer.
- Consider practices of structuring safety and creating relationships of respect and dignity which can promote a culture of accountability that generates useful and rich critique.
share some exercises for creating intentional supervisory relationships. - Create cultures of accountability that invite critique that are a resistance against surveillance practices of supervision.
- Practice examples of “Living Supervision”, and creating “Solidarity Teams” to assist practitioners to work in alignment with our collective ethics
More Information and registration
SARA for Women
Community Worker Workshop
The work that the staff of SARA for Women, and other feminist organizations, do in community can be draining, exhausting, difficult, and demanding. Some times we need a tune-up, a time to step away from the doing to focus on why we do this work, how we can do it better, how we can do it more sustainably, and how we can look after ourselves and each other as we look after women and children in our communities.
Please come spend the day with us. Lunch will be provided. We will get started promptly at 9:00 a.m. Doors will open at 8:30 and we encourage you to come early to have a coffee and reconnect with your friends and colleagues.
Staff of other community organizations with which we work are also invited to attend. SARA staff will be paid for the day.
Thu, 27 February 2020
9:00 AM – 4:00 PM PST
Garden Park Tower
2825 Clearbrook Road #101
Abbotsford, BC V2T 6S3
Yukon Victim Services
Resisting Vicarious Trauma and Burnout with Collective Care
Join activist and therapist Vikki Reynolds for a free workshop – Resisting Vicarious Trauma and Burnout with Collective Care
Workers responding to people struggling with substance use, poverty, violence and oppression are often told that they will ‘burn out’, and that it is the connection to the client’s pain that ‘traumatizes’ them; that is one perspective. Vikki offers another; she believes that clients don’t harm us, nor does their suffering, it is the spiritual ethical pain that follows when we are unable to work in ways that are ethical, dignified and structurally supported that hurt us. When we stay with connection, resist disconnection and enmeshment we are able to do ‘collective care’ as opposed to self-care.
Tue, 4 February 2020
9:30 AM – 4:00 PM PST
High Country Inn
4051 4 Avenue
Whitehorse, YT Y1A 1H1
