Offered by Strategic Interventions, Politicizing Your Practice is an intensive, one-day hybrid workshop for frontline workers, counsellors, social workers, mental health practitioners, legal system players, and community organizers who want to align their practice with social justice and collective liberation.

This training invites participants to critically examine the political and structural conditions shaping both gender-based violence and the systems survivors are forced to navigate. We look beyond individual pathology to explore how trauma is socially produced and sustained, and how our responses—both as individuals and institutions—can either reinforce or resist harm.

Participants will engage in deconstructing dominant trauma theory, challenging approaches that isolate trauma within individuals while ignoring the collective, historical, and systemic nature of violence. Together, we will explore the concept of healing the collective soul wound, address the intergenerational transmission of trauma, and deepen our understanding of mental health through the lens of collective grief, rage, resistance, and survival.

Learning Outcomes:

• Situating Practice in Power: Analyze how colonialism, capitalism, white supremacy, ableism, and patriarchy shape both violence and our responses to it.
• Deconstructing Trauma Theory: Challenge individualized models of trauma and integrate analysis that centres collective harm, historical context, and social violence.
• Understanding the Soul Wound: Explore how structural violence creates and sustains deep collective and ancestral trauma.
• Mental Health and Collective Grief: Reframe mental health struggles in the context of collective grief, rage, and systemic dispossession, rather than pathologizing individual responses.
• Rejecting Neutrality: Recognize the risks of “neutral” practice and how depoliticized approaches can uphold institutional harm.
• Sustaining Political Practice: Learn strategies to resist institutional pressures, understanding co-optation, and ways to stay rooted in community-accountable frameworks.
• Call to Action: Leave with a clear understanding of how to politicize your practice, engage in collective healing, and contribute to structural and cultural change in your field and community.

This workshop is for those who know that supporting people is not neutral work—it is political, it is urgent, and it requires an intentional, justice-driven response. If you are ready to move beyond compliance, this is your call to action.