about juno zavitz
I’m Juno (he/him). I wear a number of hats in my professional life, including those of consultant/facilitator and counsellor for non-profits, frontline workers in social services, and community members in caregiving roles. After a decade of frontline, management, and psychoeducation work in addictions, harm reduction, housing, and bereavement across Canada and the US, I found that I most love working with people and teams moving through grief, burn out, conflict and loss of trust - communities that are in need of repair and solidarity. My background in this work comes from formal education in social service work and psychotherapy, chaplaincy and theology, end of life care, and visual arts.
In 2020, I founded GLoW: the Grief, Loss and Wellness Initiative at Breakaway Community Services, Canada’s first direct service worker wellness program within the overdose crisis, for which I won the 2022 United Way Bhayana Family Foundation award for Creativity and Innovation within social services. Program development continues to be a favourite area of mine to work within, especially around grief and loss.
My work is dually informed by lived experience and professional training. I am in long-term recovery from the impacts of trauma and substance use, and draw from these experiences to build understanding and compassion for clients with similar circumstances. I additionally have the experience of life-change loss and grief, which is at the heart of my calling in this work.
Outside of my professional life, I am a graduate student at the University of Toronto completing two degrees in theology and spiritually-integrated psychotherapy, distance trail runner, amateur mycologist and citizen scientist, sci-fi enthusiast, mythology nerd, and parent to a rescue xoloitzcuintli named Toci.
coach, consultant, spiritual care counsellor, psychoeducator
Mission
Apporai Consultancy and Counselling seeks to foster individual and organizational wellness, sustainability, and transformation. Our work is rooted in models of transformative/restorative justice, harm reduction, de-carceration, and opposition to systemic violence such as white supremacy and colonialism.
Within organizations, we aim to address burnout, vicarious trauma and loss, lateral violence and conflict within staff teams, grounding these efforts in a commitment to solidarity and unity. For individuals, we aim to provide liberatory, spiritually-minded care for those moving through periods of change, loss, and growth.
Vision
We envision a world where organizations are guided by ethics of dutiful love and conflict literacy to end cycles of hierarchical and lateral violence. In this world, communities are skilled in navigating grief, meaning-making, justice, repair, and reconciliation.
Harm is met with accountability and compassion, and healing is embraced as a collective responsibility. Care work is recognized as a sacred act and birthright both as the cared for, and the care providers.
spiritual life and frameworks
Spirituality is the foundation that my life is built on, and it features strongly in my professional roles. I work from a worldview that understands the spiritual dimension as that part of us concerned with meaning-making in times of loss, change, celebration and injustice, and work to do this in a way compatible with interfaith religious frameworks, as well as agnosticism and atheism.
This framework does not mean a proselytizing or evangelical approach - I recognize the incredible harm done in the name of spirituality and religion, and would sooner belong to loving atheistic communities than hateful religious ones. Including a spiritual lens in my work instead means leaving room for these meaning-making questions and explorations to unfold.
My current areas of study as a dual Master of Divinity and Master of Psychospiritual Studies candidate at the University of Toronto’s Emmanuel College are interfaith leadership, liberation theology, non-denominational spiritual psychotherapy, and queer feminist theologies of eros , longing, and desire. I have a busy and beautiful spiritual life, and am an initiated Aborisha marked for Kariocha in a Toronto-based Lucumi ilé, a liberal Quaker by ancestry and convincement, and member of a radically loving and liberatory queer Christian community.
“After all, still, the God question. With one last gasp of theological authority, let me therefore say – that for which God is a nickname cares not whether you believe in God. Doesn’t give a damn. Isn’t in the damning business. What matters, what might matter endlessly, is what we earth-dwellers now together embody. Not what we say about God but how we do God.” - Catherine Keller
