Truth and reconciliation was never going to be enough on its own.
Reconciliation education asks us to repair the past. Relationship evolution asks us to co-create a different future.
“We change organizations and communities by rebuilding the relationships inside them.”
— Dr. Denise Findlay
Your organization is full of perfect strangers.
A perfect stranger goes to the cultural safety training and learns all the terms. Then they hide behind their computers doing admin work. What they never do is let any of it reach them personally, because that’s where the risk is. The person sitting across from them feels every bit of that distance, because nobody has ever felt welcome in front of someone being careful with them.
Most of them are good people who want to do this well, but nobody has ever taught them how. They don’t deal with their people because they’re paralysed by fear of conflict and HR complaints.
Relational work is emotional work.
It asks you to stay in the room when it gets uncomfortable and let what you hear change you. The one-day workshop doesn’t teach that, so people say nothing. They’re afraid of saying the wrong thing and making it worse, so keeping quiet looks like the responsible choice.
Silence is what’s doing the damage. Conflict isn’t the enemy.
Two people arguing honestly are in better shape than two people tiptoeing around each other, and no organisation has ever fixed itself by waiting in the dark for things to settle down.
You know something isn’t working, but nothing you have been sold so far has told you what to do about it.
Most reconciliation education leaves people worse than it found them, with better vocabulary.
Ten thousand dollars gets you a four-hour training from somebody who has no philosophy of education behind them and no idea how a human being develops. It stays at the surface because that’s what’s comfortable for the person delivering it. Going deeper means sitting in a room while grown adults get defensive, or cry, or say the thing they’ve been holding for years, and most trainers can’t hold that and don’t want to try. So they hand out language and process frameworks instead.
Attendance gets counted, the training goes on the reconciliation action plan as complete and lands in next year’s report as an impressive percentage. But nobody ever asks whether people are treating each other differently.
“Approaches that assume people will do better if they know better are ineffectual.”
— Dr. Denise Findlay
Knowing was never the thing standing in the way. Fear was. Your people walked in scared of getting it wrong and walked out scared of getting it wrong with a longer list of ways to fail.
“The underdeveloped person with the wrong tool will use that tool to do harm.“
— Dr. Denise Findlay
Give a frightened person a framework and they’ll use it to protect themselves. A right answer tells you what to say so nothing can be pinned on you afterwards, but it tells you nothing at all about the person sitting in front of you.
Your people don't need to be more correct. They need to be less afraid of being wrong.
Somewhere along the way...
… people picked up the idea that having meaningful connection means finding the exact right words at the perfect moment, and never once causing offence. That’s an impossible standard and no relationship has ever been built on it. Perfection was never the price of entry.
This is called becoming the imperfect friend and it comes out of Sḵwx̱wú7mesh teachings.
It means you absorb what somebody tells you instead of deflecting it, and let it change what you do next. When you get it wrong, and you will, say so and don’t leave.
That’s what it takes for the perfect stranger to become a friend. And it’s available to you on a bad day with no training at all.
Relationships are medicine, and they work imperfectly.
Two people who trust each other can disagree, because they’re not worried the relationship won’t survive it. Connection can exist in the presence of conflict, and that’s the whole point. Nobody heals alone.
Transformation happens in the space between people.
“It is an imperfect, perfect process because we are imperfect and fallible.”
— Dr. Denise Findlay
“People are not the problem to be fixed. Relationships, culture, belonging, and community are the medicine that support healing.”
— Michael Franklin, Manager, Foundry Cariboo Chilcotin
The Relationship Evolution
Relationships aren’t static. They’re either developing or they’re wearing away, and that’s as true of an organisation and the community it serves as it is of two people who share an office.
When the parts of us that know how to be in relationship atrophy, we see widespread suffering. It shows up as the workplace nobody wants to be in and a community that has stopped expecting anything different.
So before any strategy gets written, we invest in trust and human connection, because people grow and learn when they feel seen and cared for. Change can’t be imposed. It has to be influenced, and relationships are where influence comes from.
Reconciliation education stops at understanding. Relationship evolution takes you the rest of the way.
Every relationship we’re called into sits somewhere on these five stages. We’ve observed this same pattern across communities, health systems, schools and government. Knowing where you are tells you what needs to happen next. Each stage gives the relationship something it didn’t have before and by the last stage your relationship has all five.
Want to find out what stage you’re in?
Reconciliation education has never made a difference to the people we work with.
Indigenous communities, children, youth and families
Practitioners, counsellors, social workers and health professionals
Leaders, policy makers and administrators
Non-profits
Educational Institutions
Government
When you're ready for something deeper than reconciliation education, here's how we can help you:
Hear it from the people who've been in the room with us.
“It’s a little bit like hanging out with Jedis.“
— Steve Mathias, Co-Executive Director, Foundry BC
“This isn’t the kind of training, workshop or education where you can take notes with a pen and paper. It’s a full mind, body and soul experience.“
— Tiera Murray, Group Facilitator, Foundry Abbotsford
“Colleagues and friends have noticed that I am more grounded, easy going and calm.“
— Brennan Macdonald, Manager, Island Health
“These experiences result in transformational learning which is the most incredible form of education for you to pass on.“
— Heather Campbell, Assistant Professor in Nursing, University of the Fraser Valley
“If you are in a place where you feel ready to slow down and get honest, this will be transformative.“
— Rachel Foster, Clinical Lead
Nobody else sits in the middle of relationships.
We don't pick a side. We co-create something new with both and walk people across together.
Most people arrive without the words for what’s going on. Working out what’s underneath is where we start.