Upcoming and Recent Events

Postponed due to COVID-19

Centering Ethics in Group Supervision: Creating a Culture and Structuring Safety: A Supervision of Solidarity

March 19 & 20, 2020 (9:00am – 4:30pm)
Wood’s Homes, Parkdale Campus, Calgary
I will illuminate my stance for a Supervision of Solidarity and an ethic of Justice-Doing as a frame for the supervision of community work and therapy, and 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 supervision, and participate in a the supervision practice of a “Solidarity Group” with an intention of “walking our talk” and opening up our collective work to a hopeful skepticism that questions the ethics alive in our practice.This two-day workshop is designed for those who are providing supervision or serving as team leads to counsellors or community service workers or for those with limited experience in the counselling supervision field and seeking an increased understanding of group supervision practices.
This two-day workshop is designed for those who are providing supervision or serving as team leads to counsellors or community service workers or for those with limited experience in the counselling supervision field and seeking an increased understanding of group supervision practices.
This experiential course 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

$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).

narrative project

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

General Registration $125.00

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

alberta college of social workers

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

Conference Registration

Postponed due to COVID-19

2020 04 16 Moms stop the harm

Postponed due to COVID-19

RESISTING BURNOUT WITH COLLECTIVE CARE April 21 Kamloops

Postponed due to COVID-19

TRAUMA AND RESISTANCE:INNOVATIVE RESPONSES TOOPPRESSION,VIOLENCE AND SUFFERING April 22 Kamloops

Institure of narrative therapy logo

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

Peak Resilience and Vikki Reynolds presentMaking Private Practice Sustainable & Ethical from a Stance of Justice Doing8:30 AM – 4:30 PMVikki ReynoldsPhD RCCis an activist/therapist from Vancouver, Canada, who works to bridge the worlds of social justice activism and therapy. Vikki is a white settler of Irish, Newfoundland and English folks, and a heterosexual woman with cisgender privilege. Her experience includes supervision and therapy with peers, activists, and other workers responding to the opioid epidemic/poisonings, torture and political violence, sexualized violence, mental health and substance misuse, homelessness and legislated poverty and working alongside gender and sexually diverse communities. Vikki is an Adjunct Professor and has written, keynoted and presented internationally on the subjects of ‘Witnessing Resistance’ to oppression/trauma, ally work, resisting ‘burnout’ with justice-doing, a supervision of solidarity, ethics, and innovative group work.→ VikkiReynolds.caEvent: October 2, 8:30 AM – 4:30 PMRegistration opens June 1, 2020Location: 808 Nelson St. Vancouver, BCWe will be exploring the following ideas related to sustaining ourselves and ensuring ethical practice within the context of private or alternative practice:• Resisting isolation, building solidarity, and collective accountability• Inviting community accountability practices• Unsettling settler privilege and an ethical stance for Justice-Doing• Embracing intersectionality and inclusion• The Zone of fabulousness: Resisting Burnout, Disconnection, and Enmeshment• Defining ethically driven practice that balances the needs for financial compensation with meeting the needs of the community • Sharing knowledge and experience in managing these challenges$150Oct 2Alternative practitioners often work in isolation, where solidarity is hard to find, and the necessities of not having a wage and benefits can be a struggle. Many alternative counsellors and therapists attempt to stay ethical within this context of privatization and social inequity. In this workshop we’ll address the binary of private practice vs social sector work, as there are fabulous folks doing justice in each. It’s not where you work that makes you ethical, it’s your ethical stance, accountability practices and keeping clients at the centre. Many practitioners have sought alternative work to be more ethical than some agency/authority has allowed for. We’ll explore these tensions in practice together in this dialogue

SARA logo

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

Peak Speaks Rupture & Repair, Morally Courageous Dialogue & Cultures of Accountability