Relationship comes before everything else.
Meet the Team
Angie Brinoni
Masters in Education Candidate, Accredited Addiction Counsellor
I care for people with food. It doesn’t matter if we’re in a boardroom or a community hall, I’ll work out what you like to eat and get it in front of you. Feeding people is the quickest way I know to get someone to feel more at ease. It’s hard to stay guarded with a person when they’ve just handed you good food full of love.
The meal is only the start, though. Once you’re fed and settled, I’ll challenge every assumption you walked in with.
Big emotion doesn’t unnerve me like it does most people. I grew up in a big Italian family where we yelled when we were happy and we yelled when we were sad. We’re passionate and expressive, so when someone has an emotional eruption, I feel a jolt of excitement and think, “oh, now we’re cooking”, because we’re getting to the truthful part where we put it all on the table and have a courageous conversation.
If you never have those passionate moments where you’re flailing your hands around and stomping your feet, you can’t have the incredible transformations I’ve seen in this work. Being nice and politically correct only leads to suppression. I think of conflict as adding a little pepper to the soup. We need some spice in our lives because it creates breakthroughs and change.
When I go into an organisation, I take what we teach and build it into programmes and systems that hold up in the real world, where people have to do hard things alongside one another. I saw firsthand what the Gathering Our Medicine framework does when I was working in a youth and family treatment centre. We went from youth going AWOL and a 5% graduation rate to 100% graduation and zero AWOLs over three years, with the frontline workers staying in their positions the whole time without any HR complaints.
Then I took the framework home to my own family, which is quite diverse. We raised our own children and the many others our kids brought home or that family members asked us to support, and I watched all 14 of them move from trauma and tragedy to success and thriving. I knew then that this work was what I needed to be doing for the rest of my life. I want to share this relational way of being with anyone who will listen.
That’s why I get so fierce about the idea that human beings aren’t disposable. If organisations invested in people the way we invest in personal relationships, and leaders showed up as good relatives instead of task managers, you’d see far less burnout and fewer people mentally checking out of jobs that stopped treating them as human.
Most people meet me and see a sweet little grandmother, adorable and harmless, so they’d never guess I can ride and shoot like Annie Oakley. People are always more than just one thing you see. When you don’t look past the surface, you miss everything else they’d have brought.
Heard around the fire
Angie is the walking, talking embodiment of relationality and care. She makes friends everywhere she goes and gets people fired up about this work no matter what their role or organisation. She has endless energy and positivity, and she isn’t afraid to roll up her sleeves and get her hands dirty, learning on the job and taking on new challenges. She thinks outside the box to find creative solutions that meet our clients’ needs, and when she goes into communities people can’t help but love her and respond to what she teaches.
Shanelle Bath
Master of Education (MEd), Child and Youth Care Counsellor (CYCC)
Genealogies are my thing. I carry a map in my head of how people are connected. If I meet you and you tell me who you’re related to, I’ll hold onto it, and somewhere down the line I’ll know exactly how you connect to someone else. I remember details from Indigenous communities, the cultural teachings, the names for places, who belongs to whom, and I’ve been this way ever since I was little.
I always knew I’d end up working with young people. It comes from my role in my family, being the youngest of my entire generation and then the babysitter for the next one.
Now I’m the one working alongside youth and families in our Gathering Our Medicine programmes.
My offering in a group is usually stories. I love to share the ones I’ve gathered from working with young people that support the teaching and make it real. I read rooms and people closely, and I pick up the small things most people miss that tell me what’s really going on underneath. Then I speculate. That’s my real superpower. I try different ideas for where a person might be coming from until I understand them.
When a breakthrough finally comes, I feel it in my gut and my chest. I call them exclamation mark moments. Someone gets authentic or courageous and the whole room fills with a tremendous amount of energy that brings me alive along with it. A space that felt contained a moment ago is suddenly full of potential.
I don’t believe culture on its own heals anyone. I’ve spent a long time in Indigenous services, and I’ve met elders and knowledge carriers who weren’t relational, so they couldn’t create the conditions a young person needs to heal. People sometimes mix up culture and relationships, but they aren’t the same. They think if you bring in someone with a cultural teaching, the work is done. But the teaching alone isn’t what heals. It’s how the person carrying it shows up. Are they attending to the relationship and really caring for the person in front of them? So many healing places forget that the relationship is the whole thing, and they get busy trying to make something happen instead of building the relationship that would let it happen.
What inspires me most is the possibility that opens up when we invite people to bring their whole selves, not just tolerating difference but welcoming it. People are hungry for that kind of invitation. There’s so much fear around saying the right thing and being perfect, so people shrink themselves to fit what’s expected of them, and end up feeling pigeonholed and restricted.
When someone is told they can be themselves, that their spirit and their life experience are welcome, the relief is enormous, and it turns into a real sense of belonging. We don’t teach people to copy how we show up, because there’s no one right way to do it. We teach them to be more themselves, and find the unique thing that they bring into the relational space.
Away from work I’m obsessed with Frenchies. I have three of them and they’re a pack of chaos, so a lot of my time and energy goes into being their parent. I’m also a bit of a serial quitter of hobbies. I’ll throw myself into a hobby, go really hardcore for a short while, then never pick it up again. I can hold the genealogy of half a continent in my head, but I can’t hold onto a hobby for a month. And I guess that’s because for me, it all comes back to the same thing. Relationships are the centre of everything.
Heard around the fire
Shanelle has a way of making a person feel seen and welcomed, and she builds genuine relationships with ease, which is what lets people open up around her. She brings her own lived experience of navigating complex systems into the work, so she meets people with empathy and a practical sense of what they’re up against. She listens deeply, notices the strengths in others, and helps people discover meaningful connections with one another. Shanelle dances in the moment and brings a deep wisdom. She’s often the voice of reason, bringing insights that would otherwise be missed. Her favourite question is “Are you in, or in the way?”
Denise Findlay
PhD, ICF-Accredited Professional Coach, Certified Organization & Relationship Systems Coach, Certified Co-Active Coach
No amount of education saves you when a kicked chair comes flying across the circle at you in anger.
I understood instantly that none of my training had prepared me for this work and I knew I had a choice to make. I could stay in the room or run away. I chose to stay and I have stayed in these emotionally charged rooms ever since that day early in my career.
Running away is never the answer and neither are band aid solutions. If I wanted to be of any use as an educator, I had to work on my own eldership and my inner self and learn to be present with every kind of person, no matter what they brought into the room. That set me on a path of evolving who I am as a human being, seeking out cultural teaching and specialized training in process psychology and attachment theory, and learning everything I could so I could stay in the situations most people run away from.
Looking back, I’ve been this way since I was a child. I was the sensitive one in a stoic family that didn’t talk about things, so I never quite fit. I grew up noticing the patterns everywhere I went and I could never leave them alone, either. I wanted to talk about the patterns, but the people around me didn’t want to get deeper than the superficial stuff.
A friend once said that I walk into a room and ask why everyone’s sitting in the dark. I then go and switch the light on, and everyone jumps up to switch it back off and gets angry at me for turning it on. But that’s exactly what I do. I turn the light on, even when I know everyone would rather I didn’t.
When I’m working with a group, I can read the emotional energy and feel when it’s time to shift gears. Often that means being the one to go first and be vulnerable, because when people see me do it, it makes them feel more able to do the same. I don’t always know where my words come from in those moments. They seem to channel through the crown of my head, and I find myself saying things I didn’t know I knew, but only ever when I’m in the moment with other people. I don’t know if it’s spirit or creator or something else, I just know I’m being guided then.
Sometimes those moments of breakthrough are really hard to get to and it can feel like it’s never going to happen. Then all of a sudden someone steps up and starts saying the important things and leading, and I feel the load lift off me because they’ve got it now. That transfer of power hits me in the gut and the heart, and I’m almost always blindsided by the awe and pride that I feel when it happens. That’s when I know we’re where we’re meant to be and the pathway of change becomes a little easier to walk.
I believe that every single one of us is very powerful. Every person has the capacity to change their life, no matter their suffering, circumstances, trauma, or history. I know some people have had really awful things happen to them, but I don’t buy into a narrative of disempowerment. So much of the work in the Indigenous field is too focused on the past, which means we aren’t creating the kind of shared space for people to imagine a new future. Intellectual skills training on its own just keeps people stuck if the facilitators doing it don’t understand human development and holistic education. Relationships are the foundation of this work, and when you get that right, people come back to life.
In most of the organisations I work in, people walk around like disembodied heads, half asleep, going through the motions of the job to get a paycheck. Change happens when leaders are willing to take people into the messy places where they can be real, say what they really think, work through conflict and share creative ideas. Too many people lead from a place of fear and while I understand the worry about getting things perfect, having the courage to lead differently is where the magic happens.
In my own life, Disneyland is my relational prescription. My kids always have their emotional crash out, the tears come, and then we all fall back into relationship and we work all the things out. This probably surprises people, because they assume I’m serious and intense since the work I do can be heavy. But really I’m the class clown who never grew out of it. Just because the work is emotional and hard at times, doesn’t mean you can’t still have fun doing it.
Heard around the fire
Denise brings a rare balance between head and heart and a combination of deep academic expertise, lived experience, and cultural wisdom. As a Sḵwx̱wú7mesh woman who continues to live within her community, she carries the teachings, relationships, and responsibilities of her Nation into every space she enters. Her PhD and decades of experience in attachment, trauma, Indigenous knowledge systems, and organisational development allow her to bridge Indigenous and Western perspectives with integrity in a way that is rare.
Denise creates spaces where people feel safe enough to be themselves, to open up and reflect, and move toward healing. She inspires people, and draws you in closer by asking the right questions or telling stories that are so relatable and honest that you see yourself in her. She helps you to become yourself more.