Relational Readiness for Supporting Indigenous Clients, BC Association of Social Workers

Before You Sit Down: Relational Readiness for Social Workers Supporting Indigenous Clients and Families

DESCRIPTION

Social workers often enter helping relationships with good intentions, training, and a desire to support change. Yet when working with Indigenous clients, families, and communities, trust is shaped not only by what we know, but by how we show up.

This interactive webinar explores “the work before the work”: the relational, ethical, emotional, and cultural preparation that helps social workers practice with greater humility, accountability, and care. Participants will consider how power, pacing, assumptions, discomfort, and professional norms can shape whether a client experiences the relationship as safe, respectful, and useful.

A central theme of the webinar is creating space for the whole client. This includes explicitly naming that clients may bring cultural, spiritual, family, land-based, community, and identity-based parts of themselves into the work; respectfully learning about client and family and community norms; and inviting clients to identify cultural tools, supports, resources, or practices they would like included where appropriate.

Through storytelling, reflective prompts, brief interactive polling, and practical discussion, participants will explore how to slow down before assessment, intervention, or treatment planning and attend to the relational conditions that support culturally safer practice.

PRESENTER

Alanah is a St'at'imc woman with Indigenous(St'at'imc,) European(Scottish/English/Scandinavian/Russian) and African (Nigerian) ancestors. She is registered social worker -psychotherapist/counsellor/facilitator/creative/educator who works collaboratively with people, relationships, communities, and organizations.

Alanah has specific training and clinical skills in treating trauma and its impacts, while recognizing that people are more than what has happened to them. Her work pays attention to both individual experience and the larger picture — including relationships, family, community, culture, racism, colonialism, gender, social conditions, and other systems that can shape how people understand themselves and move through the world.

Alanah holds a BSc, MSc in Community Health Sciences, and MSW with a focus on Indigenous trauma and resiliency. Across her work, she brings together the individual and the wider context, creating space for healing, growth, understanding, reconnection, and meaningful change.