COACHING RESILIENCE IN HARM REDUCTION
COACHING RESILIENCE in HARM REDUCTION with the Dr. Peter AIDS Foundation, Vancouver.
With their Knowledge Translation team leading the Dr. Peter Centre’s growth into a national network, I coached and facilitated their teams with skills and structures for collaborative leadership, emergent development, collective organizing, circle process, rights-based health and social engagement strategies, trauma healing, and national systems creation.
“Good Allyship is possible.
We need all of us to make this great transformation happen.
Its time for a new story… a story that includes all of us.”
Indigenous Knowledge Keepers of The Restoring Collective
Resetting the frame of how deep front-line work happens was an ongoing theme.
The invitation is on for Allies of every background
Its a world of work that requires resilient hearts that consciously engage in challenging scenarios every day. Through team focused workshops and national summits, we created new narratives of what this work means:
- This work directly connects your personal identity with some of the most challenging issues of our communities today: poverty, substance use, homelessness, exclusion. And these communities transform those issues into new social patterns of inclusion, strength, trust, belonging and transformation.
- This community is heart based. It is a community of generosity, compassion, non-judgement, diversity, inclusion, spirit, and witnessing. It demands of your heart every day, requires an immense array of skills and tools, and is, for most who work and live in this field, the most rewarding and true expression of human to human work.
- This field innovates everyday practices that become mainstream far down the path. As social creators, Dr. Peter Centre and their networks across the continent work without mainstream supports, collaborating to create lives and social systems anew every day.
- Engage everywhere. The Work can and should take us wherever humans do what humans do: parks, streets, nightclubs, malls, dining tables, art studios, on the land, at home.
to learn, embody, and take action with Indigenous partners, to heal the ongoing damage of colonization culture.
As a Facilitator with Indigenous partners, I uphold Indigenous ways of being to create impactful retreats and strategies. Taught to me by my many Indigenous Elders, friends, collaborators and mentors, the principles of action enable earthwise, holistic, relational, inclusive, accountable, systemic and inclusive development.
As an Ally Coach, I help potential Allies work with their inner narratives, implicit privileges, their embodied capacity for equity, shift their beliefs of what is possible, and reconnect with their own Indigeneity, to catalyse collaborative Indigenous ways of growth and equity.
The Harm Reduction field is constantly inspiring, grounding, compassionate and challenging, and Dr. Peter Centre is known as a global leader of practice and impact. I was honoured to work with these angel-warriors of healing.
TESTIMONIAL:
“The Dr. Peter Centre is a non-profit organization providing care to 400+ people living with HIV and other biopsychosocial barriers to health, including substance use, mental illness, and housing insecurity.
The Dr. Peter Centre’s Knowledge Translation & Evaluation (KTE) team serves to enhance the capacity of other frontline organizations across Canada.
Christine was contracted by the Dr. Peter Centre’s KTE team to strengthen the team’s skills and confidence to lead in their work.
Over the past 18 months, Christine has created and facilitated the following:
- Individualized coaching and mentorship to the KTE Manager to build her confidence and capacity to support the needs of a growing team, and uncover her personal leadership style.
- Circle Process with KTE team members to build their personal and collective understanding of Indigenous allyship and culturally safety as they prepared to step into partnership with a national Indigenous organization.
- 2, 2-day, in-person evaluation summits for DPC’s national COVID-19 Vaccine Micro-Contribution initiative, that included cultural teachings and gifting ceremony led by Indigenous Elders, storytelling and restoration as an evaluation practice, and somatic exercises to promote generative dialogue, celebration, and resilience among front-line harm reduction participants.
- 5-day deep dive retreat for KTE team members in response to their rapid growth. The week-long sessions enabled trust building and role clarity between team members, promoted whole person regard, and a shared vision for the team’s collective work moving forward.
- 3, full day sessions to strategise structural development and practice integrity across a rapidly growing national network. We devised a hub structure to enable community authority and agency to support local innovation and cross-sector resourcing.
- 3-day conflict resolution training in response to the needs identified by the KTE team to build their capacity to hold virtual spaces with the national harm reduction community. Christine recognizes conflict as an opportunity for transformation. Team members had the opportunity to learn about their personal conflict resolution style, practice somatic-based techniques to stand in conflict, and dialogue practices to explore the impact of effective non-violent communication.
The impact of these sessions has resulted in the KTE team’s ability to find strategic and innovative pathways forward in the face of complex inter-organizational dynamics, as well as a sense of cohesion and connection among KTE members and workshop participants contributing to heart-centered, whole person regard and resilience that enables people to keep moving forward in their work.
My personal experience as the KTE Manager receiving coaching and mentorship from Christine has been enriching. It has allowed me to better understand my role and sense of purpose within community harm reduction that will continue to serve me throughout my career. I am witness to her deep capacity for collaboration, creativity, and her responsiveness and adaptability to the emerging needs of everyone she works with. She is able to attune to the structural undercurrents behind stuck points, and skillfully facilitate discussions that generate innovation and systems transformation.
Christine is a spirit-based facilitator and systems transformer, and any organization would be lucky to work with her!
Courtney Pankratz, Manager of Knowledge Translation, Dr. Peter Centre, 2023.