about juno zavitz

I’m Juno (they/them). 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. Prison justice is also close to my heart, and I currently serve as a board member for Halifax Community Chaplaincy Society.

My work is dually informed by lived experience and professional training. I identify as a psychiatric consumer/survivor and person in long-term recovery from addiction, and I continue to provide mutual aid in communities of current and former drug use. Grief has also been a central focus of my life, and the experience of surviving a parent’s suicide as a teen 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, distance 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 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 dutiful love, fostering liberatory mindsets 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, essential to the flourishing of individuals and the greater whole.

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 Lucumí 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

  • I believe there's an loving, merciful, guiding force at work in the universe, but that this force is unknowable and beyond human conception and language.

    My theology makes room for polytheistic and agnostic understandings of spirituality, and is compatible with non-theistic worldviews in which meaning-making can be drawn from existential query instead. I am also fond of agnostic or atheistic understandings transcendent knowledge found in the Internal Families Systems concept of “Self Energy”.

  • The appropriation of spirituality as a tool of state control, white supremacy, and colonization is the furthest thing from sacred that I can imagine.

    I believe in separation of religion and state, and see Western, white interpretations of Christianity having strayed incredibly far from the religion's roots as a rebellious tradition that is critical of capitalism and authority, and which advocates for the liberation of the most marginalized among us. That is sacred work to me, and at the heart of my professional and spiritual commitments.

  • I believe everyone has a spiritual dimension to their lives that must be tended to in the same way we tend to our emotional, mental and physical health.

    After nearly a decade working in secular social service spaces, I found that the non-profit world is woefully ill-equipped to support the spiritual wellness of communities and individuals.

    Spiritual wellness can look like many things, some of which may be our sense of purpose in life, reckoning with why change or loss has occurred, or even working toward post-traumatic growth.