Workshops

Beyond Conflict: Moving Towards Accountability

Conflict is totally normal and it can be productive and necessary for growth! But conflict can also be destructive, especially when it escalates. These workshops offer a trauma-informed, anti-oppressive approach to preventing, de-escalating, and resolving conflicts. Each workshop includes case studies and activities geared towards the particular needs of your group or organization. They are intended to be taken in succession, but if you’ve taken similar workshops in the past then choose which workshop works best for you.

Boundary Work for Trauma BBs

Boundaries are one of the most fundamental ways that we assert our needs and build supportive relationships with others. But learning how to affirm your boundaries can be super challenging when you live with trauma. In order to survive, we learnt that the best way to protect ourselves and avoid abandonment was to have really rigid or really soft boundaries. In this workshop, we’ll thank our trauma brains for the work they’ve done to keep us safe, and we’ll start to assess the ways in which supportive boundaries can help us move forward in our healing work.

Collective Creation with Zines

Zines (short for magazines) have a long history within feminism and have fostered community building for decades. While zines can be made alone, this workshop walks participants through a short history of zines and shows participants how zine making is a practice of collective creation. Each workshop is centred around a particular question or theme that participants explore together. Past workshop questions have included: "How do I define my feminism?" and "How do we define ourselves in a world that constantly tries to tell us who we are?" Supplies are provided, and include a wide selection of magazines, paper, and other materials. 

Doing Grief Work Together

Despite the fact that death – and, by extension, grief – will happen to us all, we really don’t know what to do when faced with another person’s grief. While public grieving used to be a common practice, now grief is considered a private emotion, best confined to one’s home. How can we return to an understanding of grief rooted in the community? How can communal grief serve to support the individual grieving? Participants in this workshop will begin to unpack some of the beliefs they hold about grief, explore strategies for grief work rooted in self-care and community-care, and leave with a better understanding of their own capacity to do grief work with others.

Collaging the Tarot

Collage and tarot share many affinities: they are forms of storytelling that work with fragments; they are grounding practices that activate our vagus nerve, which helps us move out of dissociation and back into our window of tolerance. In this two-hr workshop, participants will receive an introduction to tarot, and readings of three cards that can inspire their collage. We’ll discuss the relationship between the nervous system and these two grounding practices. As part of the workshop everyone will receive a workbook and a collage kit, which you can print out or use electronically with an app, and a ritual for each of the three cards that you can use after the workshop to integrate the message of each card.

Queer & Trans-Inclusivity

No one ever starts out perfect and no one ever reaches the finish line on becoming a more inclusive, intersectional ally. Checking your privilege, being open to experiences and perspectives other than your own, and learning about different identities is a continual process. Together we’ll explore the language of gender, sex, and sexuality and their relationship to concepts such as intersectionality, privilege, and oppression. Participants will get a breakdown of important concepts and terminology and move through a series of explorative questions and group exercises that will help illuminate areas where their allyship could be improved.

We Need New Stories: How to Talk to Your Students About Mental Health

University is a deeply stressful time and the reality is that the institution is failing at supporting its students. Educators within the university are becoming increasingly aware of the role they can play in supporting their students’ mental health and wellbeing — but are unsure of how to help. During this workshop, we debunk some of the old stories that stop us from offering the support that we’re more than capable of. We then move into tangible strategies, including how to care for a student in crisis and restructuring course curriculum so that health and wellness is embedded in our teaching from Day 1.

This workshop can be adapted to suit workplace environments and conversations between friends, loved one, and community members.