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FAQ’s

We’ve gathered answers to some of our most common inquiries below. If you don’t see what you’re looking for, please reach out. We’re happy to connect and explore how we can support your organization or community.

We don’t do it in the form most organizations buy. People come out of a half-day session with the right words and go back to their desks frightened of using them wrongly.

Cultural humility takes years, and it grows inside people who are in relationship with others willing to tell them the truth. If your accreditation body needs a component you can evidence, book a free 30 minute call and we’ll tell you whether ours will satisfy it.

Gathering Our Medicine is the framework used to support the adults around youth. The four relational conditions a child needs to grow and develop are togetherness, care, rest and movement, and the adults are the ones who provide them. Families, schools, youth-serving organizations and health and social services all use it.

The Relationship Evolution Method is the framework we use inside organizations. It goes underneath strategy and policy to build the trust, accountability, psychological safety and courageous communication needed for meaningful change to take root. Senior leaders, managers and staff all do it together.

Your diversity, equity and inclusion policy sets out who belongs. Your staff decide whether anyone feels it, in the ordinary conversations they have with each other.

Organizations come to us with the strategy written and the action plan filed but can’t understand why their staff still keep their heads down. That’s the problem we’re good at.

Yes. What you’re describing is usually lateral violence, the harm people do to each other when generations of harm have been done to them and there’s nowhere else for it to go. It shows up as gossip, exclusion, undermining, and the person who speaks up paying for it.

We start by finding out what’s underneath it. People turn on each other when they’ve got no safe way to say the real thing, so one-to-one interviews surface that first. From there the work is on your managers and their capacity to handle tension in the moment.

Yes. We’ll sit with both of them, and what we’re building is their capacity to handle the next one without us.

A conflict that’s lasted this long is usually held in place by something in how the team works, so that tends to surface too.

A score tells you people don’t feel safe speaking up. It won’t tell you what taught them that, and it’s usually something specific, like a manager who reacted badly once or a decision that came down with no explanation.

The score changes once people have watched someone say a difficult thing and come out of it fine. That’s what we work on.

Nations and Indigenous communities, health authorities, universities and schools, government, non-profits, and the practitioners inside all of them. Within those its leaders, managers, and the people with no title who want a say in how things get done.

What they share is exhaustion with training that changes nothing. Most have watched conflict get handled through HR paperwork for years, and some have started wondering whether change is possible inside their system at all.

All three. If you want to work with someone on our team one to one, book a free 30 minute call and we’ll point you to whoever suits your situation best.

Fear is what stops your staff, and you can’t inform someone out of being afraid. Denise’s doctorate was in contemplative education, a discipline concerned with the development of the person doing the teaching, and that’s the level this work operates at. People build the capacity to stay present when a conversation turns difficult.

Your leadership team and your staff do it at the same time. The same relational skills get built at every level, and that’s what keeps it in place after our engagement ends.

No. People don’t say anything real in front of a stranger by lunchtime. They need weeks of watching how you handle the first honest thing before they’ll risk the second.

If a single day is what the budget allows right now, a 90 minute strategy session with Denise is likely a good place to start.

People dig in when they’re blamed, so we don’t run sessions that way. Denise, Shanelle and Angie open by listening. One-to-one interviews surface what people won’t say in a group, and the themes go back to you in words your people recognize.

Then we work those themes out loud, and that discomfort is the work. People learn to hear something hard and keep the relationship underneath intact. Leaders learn to say the difficult thing without triggering defensiveness, and to find the request underneath a complaint.

Yes. Themes go back to the organization and names stay behind.

You come out of this able to say the hard thing yourself, to the person who needs to hear it. Anyone hiring us to find out who said what has misread the work.

Yes. Denise trained in attachment with Dr. Gordon Neufeld and process work with Dr. Stephen Schuitevoerder. Her practice integrates the Co-Active Coaching Model, developmental psychology, process psychology and relationship systems theory.

In practice that means people understand their history without being defined by it. Denise doesn’t work from a narrative of disempowerment, because too much of this field keeps people looking backwards when what they need is a future they can imagine.

Other consultants sell workshops and training that stay at the surface. This team gets to the root of it, which is the relationships underneath, and works on those.

Everything is built around your organization and what it needs, so prices vary with the scope and how long we work together. We’ll work out what fits with you on a free 30 minute call.

We take a baseline before the work starts and compare it against results afterward. Every three months a strategic review tracks progress against the goals we set and confirms priorities for the next quarter.

Yes, and that’s the objective. Nothing is delivered to your people. It’s built with them, and by the end your managers are running the conversations we started.

Denise takes 6 coaching clients a year and we take on 4 organizational partnerships. Those numbers are low because an organization part way through the work needs us available when something surfaces, and we can’t add more once the year is committed.

Shanelle and Angie book their own coaching and sessions separately. Keynotes and strategy sessions have more room in the calendar, so come to us early with your dates.

We listen to what’s going on and work out together whether this is a fit. Most people arrive without the words for what they’re dealing with, so that’s where we start. If the timing isn’t right, you’ll leave knowing what would have to change first.

Coaching works differently. You apply first, complete a readiness questionnaire, and we go through your answers together on the call. Book a free 30 minute call.

Gathering Our Medicine is the framework used to support the adults around youth. The four relational conditions a child needs to grow and develop are togetherness, care, rest and movement, and the adults are the ones who provide them. Families, schools, youth-serving organizations and health and social services all use it.

The Relationship Evolution Method is the framework we use inside organizations. It goes underneath strategy and policy to build the trust, accountability, psychological safety and courageous communication needed for meaningful change to take root. Senior leaders, managers and staff all do it together.

No. We work with anyone who wants to strengthen their relationships and learn to relate better to the people around them.