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Offering Professionals a Critical Indigenous Lens to Reframe Helping & Healing Work  

Supporting Indigenous Professionals 

Why I Focus on This Work

SERVICES OFFERED

  • Confidential  1:1 Staff or Team Debriefing

  • Clinical social work supervision/consultation

  • Relational support with stressful work environments

  • Counselling support for vicarious trauma

  • 1:1 and Team Indigenous knowledge consultation

  • Customized Team training sessions 

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  • As leadership, helping professionals, educators, post-secondary students, survivors... our personal wellness journeys involve on-going growth and continuous efforts to maintain balance in day-to-day life. Support should be embedded in our work and I aim to remove any stigma connected to on-going learning & seeking help. 

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  • I offer 1:1 and group/team support and consultations in a safe, confidential way that centres around Indigenous values, traditional laws and our worldview. This can be in through telephone, Zoom or in person (when accessible).

    • Are you seeking someone to listen and who understands?

    • Are you needing to vent and release stress?

    • Do you feel like you need to debrief a difficult experience?

    • Would you benefit from processing tough situations with someone outside of your work environment who can share unbiased perspective?

    •  Would you like to enhance your work with Indigenous knowledge, values and worldview?

    • Are you struggling with personal/family situations and could use some confidential support?  

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  • My approach involves focusing on the integration of spirituality, Indigenous worldview, traditional knowledge and cultural identity development from a wholistic and strength-based perspective. 

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  • If you're an Indigenous adult working with our people, you may have been impacted by vicarious trauma - feeling the impacts of others' trauma and relating to their stressors.​

  • The last decade of my social work career has been in Adult Education, teaching and working in post secondary institutions as well as co-facilitating professional development training across Ontario where there was a focus on supporting Indigenous professionals.

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  • During this work, I noticed a significant need for supports for First Nations professionals who are working with our people... But, there was resistance to seek local and organizational counselling support (privacy and stigma). Unfortunately Western society has this unrealistic expectation that professionals are expected to be 'well' all the time. There is NO SHAME in seeking support - especially as First Nations, communal people who had supports for all ages and stages built in to every aspect of the old way of life.  

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  • I have been very fortunate to have amazing traditional knowledge carriers as teachers who prepared me to work in this capacity. I strongly believe our original and inherent worldview - ways of knowing, being, understanding and doing in the world - is the answer to wellness and success in life (and I should add that Western version of success is not the same as Indigenous success).

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  • Mino Bimaatisiwin (living a good life) involves so much more than understanding the medicine wheel and 7 Grandfather/13 Grandmother teachings.

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  • Living well involves 'Gi-kendan aanti e onjiiyan' - a concept meaning you've got to know where you come from, to know where you're going.  - an essential component in healing from intergenerational and colonial trauma. This involves a resurgence of old knowledges.

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  • It also involves decolonizing - an awareness raising of how we were all born into a society where Western worldview, conflicting values and meanings have been deeply embedded into our sub-consciousness and how we can shift into our inherent worldview. 

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I currently have working relationships with 5 Indigenous health & social service organizations across Ontario providing 1:1 guidance, staff training, team supervision and debriefing, advising and clinical supervision as needed. I bring a unique perspective and an external or anti-colonial view of difficult or complex situations.

The support for staff can be a mix of personal and work-related issues with the goal of helping people share their gifts to help our community members as best  they can.

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