Keynote by Denise Findlay
For: School of Biomedical Engineering, UBC Point Grey Campus
June 16th (closed event)
When Relationship is the Prescription
Reimagining Connection, Belonging, and Youth Well-Being Through an Indigenous Relational Lens
Across British Columbia, young people are asking for more than access to services. Beneath requests for support, mentorship, and opportunity lives something deeper: a longing for connection, belonging, and meaningful relationship.
While youth may arrive in our classrooms, programs, labs, or community spaces seeking learning, skill development, or support, what often matters most is whether they feel seen, welcomed, and connected while they are there.
Each young person arrives as an individual, yet each is shaped through relationship—by family, peers, community, culture, and the wider social world around them. Many young people today are navigating disconnection, loneliness, performance pressure, and increasing complexity. In this context, belonging is not an extra. Relationship is not secondary. These are foundational conditions for learning, growth, wellness, and human development.
This keynote invites educators, practitioners, mentors, and youth-serving leaders to shift their lens: from focusing only on what we teach young people, to also considering who young people become in relationship with us.
Drawing on Denise Findlay’s work as a Sḵwx̱wú7mesh scholar, educator, coach, and founder of Gathering Our Medicine, this keynote introduces an Indigenous relational framework for understanding connection, belonging, and meaningful attachment with young people through:
- Rest – creating space for nervous systems to settle, recover, and feel safe
- Play – inviting curiosity, imagination, experimentation, and joy
- Care – tending to human needs through embodiment, reciprocity, and relationship
- Relational Presence – the practice of being fully with young people in ways that foster trust, dignity, and belonging
Through story, reflection, and practice-informed insight, participants will be invited to consider how relational approaches can transform the way we support and engage young people across educational, outreach, and community settings—including mentorship and STEM learning environments.
This keynote offers both a reframe and an invitation: to recognize relationship as a vital condition for youth flourishing, and to intentionally cultivate spaces where young people feel connected enough to belong, safe enough to learn, and supported enough to imagine who they might become.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Denise Findlay (Tslekxáliya) is a Sḵwx̱wú7mesh scholar, educator, speaker, certified leadership and relationship systems coach, and founder of Gathering Our Medicine—an Indigenous relational framework that supports healing, belonging, leadership, and human development through relationship.
With over 20 years of experience working across education, leadership, community wellness, systems change, and youth and family development, Denise partners with organizations, communities, and leaders to cultivate relationally grounded approaches to learning, growth, and transformation.
Denise holds a PhD in Education from Simon Fraser University, where her research focused on Sḵwx̱wú7mesh wisdom, human potential, relationality, and the cultivation of inner power in a world of precarity. Her work brings together Indigenous knowledge, contemplative practice, attachment theory, leadership development, and systems thinking to reimagine how we live, learn, lead, and care for one another.
As founder of Gathering Our Medicine, Denise works with educators, youth-serving organizations, health teams, Indigenous communities, and leaders across sectors to create the relational conditions for belonging, trust, healing, and meaningful change.
At the heart of Denise’s work is a simple but transformative belief: relationship is medicine—and when we tend to relationship with care, new possibilities for learning, wellness, and human flourishing emerge.
Denise Findlay
PhD SFU Faculty of Education, Gathering Our Medicine Founder, Educator, Community Practitioner, Facilitator and Consultant