Collaboration, dialogue, and co-creation of possibility are at the heart of how we want to be with people, practitioners, and organizations. Shaped by narrative therapy, we engage in knowledge generation, and are committed to exploring preferred difference and possibility. This is situated within the frameworks of relational ethics and social justice.

Nora Bateson uses the metaphor of a meadow to share thinking about how all things are interconnected, shifting, and emerging. A meadow cannot be understood by examining individual plants without considering their context -neighbouring species, soil, micro-bacteria, sunlight/climate, insects, and bird droppings. Just as a meadow cannot be understood by studying individual plants in isolation, personal stories cannot be fully grasped without understanding the relational contexts that shape them. There is interconnection.

For our work, this is a reminder that everything is relational, and to resist individualizing distress. It’s a reminder to welcome complexity into our conversations and to escape causal linear thinking. Although we are teaching about ‘brief’ conversations, context is always part of the story. We are committed to naming societal traditions that come to be languaged as personal deficit. We are committed to unmasking the effects of structural oppression and societal racism.

In the face of this societal work, Vikki Reynolds reminds us that we must not side with despair. We are drawn to people’s and communities responses to suffering and hardship. There are always responses to learn about that are connected to important held values. This material can be brought into stories-in-the-making, circulated, and shouldered-up by invited others. All people and communities have a stock of knowledge and experience relevant to addressing their circumstances. We are committed to learning from people and communities.

Our time with people and communities means a lot to us. We understand these encounters as ceremony and as such our attention is to movement, learning, and growth. These are forums for dialogue and the performance of preferred lives. As definitional ceremonies, people are invited to mark shifts in identity and to be seen on and in their own terms. We look for people to mark this movement in meaningful ways and to circulate emergent preferred stories with fitting audience. It’s in these ripples that possibility, hope and solidarity find a hold.

Image of a rhizome symbolizing multiple interconnections and intersections.