Solidarity Processes For Teams
Solidarity-based team-building work is a favorite area of mine to work within. I offer medium-term processes and on-going retainer-based services for frontline and management staff that are anchored in identifying and recommitting to our shared ethics and love for our work in community care. Much of this work is rooted in my experience leading a team of 20+ staff and consultants within the GLoW Initiative, Canada’s first direct-service worker wellness program for the harm reduction sector.
Solidarity processes happen in three stages:
Frontline Staff Assessment
Group-based processes for frontline teams experiencing conflict, crisis, and tension. Areas of exploration within solidarity-building workshops include locating shared values and ethics, mapping individual and collective skills, and narrative-based practices about our calling to the work.
Assess stress and burn out levels, tension and conflict within the team, needs and wants from client-facing staff, and creation of org-specific wellness matrix.
Management Coaching
Meeting with management team to report on wellness matrix, bring forward needs from frontline staff, coaching protocols for managers to enhance conflict resiliency within teams.
These exploratory conversations with nonprofit leaders and managers often cover themes of tension, rupture and conflict both personally and within frontline teams, resulting from the impacts of vicarious trauma, loss and death, and burn out.
Recent work with management teams has increasingly focused on questions of discerning responsibility and response to frontline grievances related to oppression or harm.
All-Staff Process
Presentation of org-specific recommendations, solidarity-building process and conflict coaching.
Final all-staff processes are an opportunity to ground back into shared ethics, common goals, and stumbling blocks toward understanding and collaboration.
Themes explored often include discernment of personal and collective responsibility, lateral violence, experiences of discrimination and oppression, and operational strategies to enhance sustainability and solidarity.
Ongoing Worker Wellness Processes
I offer on-going, retainer-based services to provide conflict and sustainability coaching for frontline workers and management teams. These services respond to experiences of burn out, lateral violence, loss of trust, and vicarious trauma found in helping work within social services, healthcare, non-profits and for-profit workplaces, community organizations, and grassroots movements.
1-1 Counselling
Hour-long, virtual sessions provide a confidential space for frontline and management staff to address personal and professional challenges they encounter in their roles. Tailored to meet individual needs, each session offers support for managing stress, burnout, and the emotional toll of caregiving and leadership. Participants can explore issues related to conflict, workplace dynamics, and personal resilience while developing practical tools to cope with vicarious trauma, lateral violence, and the complexities of working within high-pressure environments.
The sessions also create a foundation for participants to reconnect with their personal values and purpose in their work, fostering a sense of meaning-making, sustainability and fulfillment.
Group-Based Processes
Facilitated sessions bring together teams to foster collective resilience, trust, and unity within the workplace. Through structured dialogues, interactive exercises, and reflection, participants engage in a process that surfaces underlying tensions, promotes understanding, and builds solidarity among colleagues.
Together, participants explore tools for navigating conflict and restoring trust, fostering a culture of mutual support and empathy. Group-based processes welcome conflict and disagreement, identify shared values, and co-create solutions that prioritize well-being and sustainability.
Teams are therefore empowered to deepen their collective commitment to their work and each other, strengthening resilience across the organization.
“Working with Juno is the best investment we can make for our teams. It has been incredibly valuable to have an offering and space that attends to the unique needs of our staff and the way they work and relate to one another – this is not only an investment in our own workforce, but building reflexive and resilient teams in the sector.
Since bringing Juno onboard, we have seen an increased willingness in staff to connect with one another and name conflicts as they arise. Staff are also more willing to take risks and engage with spaces of support in authentic ways, which in turn has translated into more authentic conversations in our day to day work.”
Grief and Loss Care
Grief, loss, and death care is close to my heart. I view the process of grieving a death or significant loss as a relationship we enter into and navigate in our own unique way. My approach to supporting communities, organizations, and individuals in grief and loss is to first make room for the breadth of experience and response that’s possible - including those who may have stigmatized or non-normative responses to grief. My work understands the goal of grief work to be the building of skill, resiliency, and autonomy to navigate and negotiate our own “right relationship” with our grief, in whatever ways we define for ourselves.
My approach to grief care has been strongly influenced by 10+ years living and working in the context of the overdose/drug poisoning crisis in “Canada”, and the resulting liberatory and resistance movements pioneered by PWUD (People Who Use Drugs). I additionally draw from Narrative-based and Internal Family Systems methodologies, particularly in regard to the ways we conceptualize and tell the story of grief. More information about my approach to grief care can be found here.
Grief Circles and Counselling
Short-term grief care circles offered to impacted community members following a death or significant non-death loss. Circles run 1.5 hours, and my response time can typically accommodate a circle within 48 hours following a loss. Circles make use of both verbal and non-verbal participation, and draw from my experience and education in both spiritual and humanist chaplaincy care.
Grief Skill-Building and Psychoeducation
Accessible, equitable, harm reduction-informed skill-building workshops for frontline workers looking to increase confidence and sustainability as a grief care provider. Focuses include applying transformative justice and abolitionist paradigms to grief care, and non-denominational spiritual care approaches to the loss and despair of the overdose/drug poisoning crisis for both care givers and care receivers.
Juno has been an invaluable leader, guiding our grief care team with exceptional knowledge and a compassionate, trauma-informed approach. Juno’s training sessions go beyond simply delivering information—they cultivate a space where volunteers feel heard, encouraged, and supported in developing their skills and facing some tough conversations.
With a facilitation style that combines expert knowledge, real-life scenarios, and interactive discussions, Juno empowers our volunteers to feel more confident and capable in providing compassionate, meaningful grief support. Their thoughtful leadership has equipped them with the tools and resilience to support our grieving community both as individuals and a collective that care for one another effectively. We highly recommend Juno’s expertise to any organization seeking truly transformative facilitation in a range of challenging topics.
Bereaved Families of Ontario - Toronto
