Summit - How We Respond: Therapy, Crisis, & Collective Care reflecting on jutice

How we respond: therapy, crisis & collective care

Starting May 1, 2026 | Live virtual debrief: May 22, 4–6pm PST

For as long as there has been oppression, there have been brilliant forms of collective resistance.

Care has always moved through people, land, kinship, and relationship, long before it was professionalized, individualized, or commodified. Even now, in moments of profound rupture, it is community and collective care that carries people through.

And yet, we are living in a time of ongoing assault. This summit is for therapists who are noticing that tension and don’t want to practice inside collapse and collective harm as if context doesn’t matter.

Get your All access pass →

2nd Annual Leaning into liberatory practice summit

centering community & collective care as a clinical, political, and ethical responsibility.

Communities are being targeted by institutions that were never designed to keep them safe.
Capitalism-induced climate change is reshaping land, survival, migration, and grief in real time.
Political polarization is intensifying harm, eroding trust, and making neutrality feel increasingly violent.

Clients arrive carrying the weight of displacement, surveillance, state violence, burnout, despair, and moral injury. They are asked to adapt to conditions that are actively harming them. They are offered individual solutions for collective devastation.

Many therapists are already feeling the weight of this.

We know therapy cannot replace community and collective care.
We know self-care cannot metabolize structural violence.
We know clinical neutrality often protects systems rather than people.

And still, we practice.

This summit exists because continuing as if these tensions do not matter shapes how harm is named, treated, and carried in the therapy room.

The 2nd annual Leaning Into Liberatory Practice Summit is a multi-day virtual event that gathers anti-oppressive therapists around the world in co-creation. This year our theme is “How We Respond: Therapy, Crisis, and Collective Care“.

This is a space to center community and collective care as a clinical, political, and ethical responsibility.

Not community as branding.
Not collective care as a slogan.
But community and collective care as lived practices that shape how safety, accountability, grief, repair, and survival actually happen.

Across long-form, conversational sessions, contributors explore:

What happens when therapy is asked to absorb what belongs to collective life
How isolation, professionalism, and expertise can quietly reproduce harm
Why accountability collapses when it is reduced to punishment or compliance
How care webs and collective response offer different possibilities
What ethical responsibility looks like when systems themselves are doing harm

These conversations are slow and layered. They circle back. They resist tidy conclusions. They move with complexity rather than around it.

This summit is not about adding another credential.

It is about ethical responsibility that extends beyond professional ethics codes.

Professional codes tend to focus on individual conduct inside the therapy room. They rarely address what happens when the world outside that room is actively producing harm, precarity, and dispossession.

Therapists hold power.
We shape meaning.
We influence how suffering is named and where it is located.

When systemic harm is framed as individual dysfunction, therapy participates in erasure. When clients are encouraged to adapt without naming violence, therapy risks complicity. When therapy is positioned as the primary site of care, community and collective care are quietly displaced.

Ethical responsibility asks us to look more honestly at:

How our work intersects with state power, capitalism, and control
Who benefits from the frameworks we rely on
What we are asking clients to endure alone
Where therapy is doing work it was never meant to do

This summit asks us to stay with those questions without rushing to resolve them.

Is this you?

This summit is for therapists who:

Already know therapy is not neutral
Feel the ethical strain of practicing inside harmful systems
Are wary of depoliticized wellness and resilience language
Want practice grounded in accountability, care, and relational ethics
Are willing to be unsettled rather than reassured

This is not a space for quick techniques, marketable frameworks or tidy certainty.

It’s for therapists that want to process the complex questions, with all it’s nuances, together in community.

When you register, you get:

Access to all pre-recorded summit conversations
Access to recordings and transcripts until December 31, 2026
A live virtual debrief space with other therapists May 22, 4–6pm PST
A shared container for reflection, ethical inquiry, and relational grounding

The summit is designed to be engaged with at your own pace. There is no expectation to keep up in real time.

Featured Conversations

We’re not kidding when we say soul-nourishing...

Archipelago of Being: Care and Survival in the Rise of Totalitarianism – Gabes Torres

Inspired by Édouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation, we explore what community care and survival might look like amid rising divisiveness, hegemonic control, and ecological crisis. Together, we imagine archipelagic ways of care and survival— multidimensional, opaque, and intertidal.

multidimensional — much like the islands of the archipelago, this is a wide embrace of multiplicity— something that totalitarianism seeks to suppress and erase. Here, we remember the multidimensionality of care and survival: social, ecological, spiritual, political... even digital!

opaque — from Édouard Glissant's "right to opacity," an ethical stance of allowing ourselves, our clients, and others to remain partially unknowable. How might we practice relationality without domination?

the intertidal self — living between worlds and tides— inner and outer landscapes. To some, it appears chaotic, but perhaps it is more multi-rhythmic. How can we meet one another in these shifting times? How can we attend to the interaction between inner and outer worlds?

In our healing and therapeutic practices, we explore what it's like to expand our capacity for a gorgeous cacophony of multiple beings.

Accountability Beyond Punishment: Relational Repair, Power, and Ongoing Responsibility – Rania El Mugammar

Accountability is often spoken about, but rarely practiced with care.
In this conversation, we untangle accountability from punishment, compliance, and carceral logic. We explore how dominant understandings of accountability are shaped by fear, hierarchy, and power, and how these frameworks often undermine the very repair they claim to seek.
We reflect on accountability as an ongoing relational process—one that requires community, emotional safety, and a willingness to be changed. Rather than a final act or a performance of remorse, accountability becomes a way of orienting toward the people we want to be, together, over time.
This conversation invites therapists to examine how accountability shows up in their work, their relationships, and their communities—and to consider what becomes possible when accountability is rooted in care, responsibility, and collective belonging rather than coercion or disposability.

Unlearning Mononormativity/Relational Hierarchy as Community Care Praxis - Ji-Youn Kim

How do we prioritize and build systems of collective and community care in a society that devalues platonic relationships? This conversation offers insight into mononormativity as an extension of cisheteropatriarchy and how it feeds into the promotion of individualism and neoliberal structures of care through the prioritization of the nuclear family unit. Practitioners are invited into anti-mononormative therapeutic practice that emphasizes the need for decentralized networks of care as a form of queer, decolonial praxis.

When Therapy Stops Acting Like Therapy: Witnessing, Relationship, and Practice Beyond Professional Containment – Travis Heath

What happens when therapy loosens its grip on technique, professionalism, and performance, and remembers how people have always found their way through suffering together? This conversation invites listeners into a slower, more relational inquiry that questions what therapy is allowed to be and who it is meant to serve. Moving through stories of rap music, skate parks, protest, birdwatching, and community life, the dialogue traces the quiet ways capitalism, regulation, and expertise shape the work, often narrowing it in the name of care. Rather than offering new methods or solutions, the conversation opens space for dignity, witnessing, and shared humanity, suggesting that healing has never belonged solely to offices, theories, or credentials. For anyone who senses that the most meaningful moments in the work tend to happen just outside the rules, this conversation offers language for what has already been known but is rarely said aloud.

Relational Healing After Tragedy: Care and Solidarity Across Healing Spaces Through Philippine Practices – Josh Rasalan & John Tolentino

This conversation emerges from a lived response to collective trauma. Grounded in the aftermath of a devastating community tragedy, we reflect on how care moved—not through institutions or formal systems alone, but through people organizing, feeding one another, sharing information, showing up, and asking the most basic question: Have you eaten?

We explore what it looks like when community responds faster than bureaucracy, when healing is not measured or credentialed, and when therapists and organizers are themselves grieving while still tending to others. We sit with the tensions of responding without adequate resources, navigating institutional power, and refusing to funnel all care through police, nonprofits, or clinical frameworks.

This is a conversation about how our cultures and histories inform our community responses—about mutual aid, relational presence, and the forms of healing that arise when people move together in the wake of harm.

Live virtual debrief for Therapists

The Summit Process

Pre-recorded conversational sessions released during the summit
Access to all recordings and transcripts until December 31, 2026
Access to a live virtual debrief to build community
Transcripts are included for accessibility

Then, join us on May 22, 4–6pm PST

After sitting with these conversations, many therapists are left holding questions that cannot be resolved alone or in private reflection.

The live virtual debrief is a one-time gathering for this cohort of therapists. It is a facilitated space to come together in real time to deepen into the ideas explored throughout the summit through shared meaning-making, ethical reflection, and relational grounding.

This gathering recognizes that community and collective care are not built through content alone, but through being in relationship, witnessing one another, and thinking together.

Ji-Youn Kim

Unlearning Mononormativity/Relational Hierarchy as Community Care Praxis

Ji-Youn (they/she) is a queer, relatively non-disabled Corean femme, immigrant and settler, joy-seeker, liberatory dreamer, psych survivor, justice-oriented therapist-ish and ongoing creation of community. Born in Bucheon, Korea, they grew up and continue to live on the unceded territories of Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations in what is colonially known as Vancouver, Canada, which shapes their relationships with land, kinship, sovereignty and co-resistance. Ji-Youn works in private/alternative practice in relationships with predominantly Sick & Disabled QTBIPOC client community members with the orientation of therapy-sh as a space to practice embodied liberatory practices in the spirit of collective liberation.

In recent years, she has also been teaching about abolitionist mental health care, the mental health industrial complex and the blurring of the categorization of therapy. Their practices are informed by Black & Indigenous feminist scholars, Disability Justice & Transformative Justice educators, abolitionists and organizers, as well as their lived experiences of mental illness/Madness and psychiatric incarceration.

itsjiyounkim.com | instagram.com/itsjiyounkim

Gabes Torres

Archipelago of Being: Care and Survival in the Rise of Totalitarianism

Gabes (she/her) is a mental health practitioner, grassroots organizer, and artist from the Global South. She offers psychosocial support to human rights defenders, climate activists, labor organizers, journalists, and other frontline workers. In her journey, she seeks to expand our practices and imaginations of community care and healing—moving beyond dominant and Western ideals.

Gabes is also a singer-songwriter, a relentless reader, and a lover of the ocean and marine life.

Instagram, Threads, and Twitter: @gabestorres

Travis Heath

When Therapy Stops Acting Like Therapy: Witnessing, Relationship, and Practice Beyond Professional Containment

Travis (he/him) is a licensed psychologist and is an Associate Professor at San Diego State University where he serves as Chair of the Department of Counseling & School Psychology. Past work he’s been involved with looked at shifting from a multicultural approach to counseling to one of cultural democracy that invites people to heal in mediums that are culturally near. His most recent work involves incorporating the work of Black abolitionist scholars into psychotherapy, community healing, and uprising. His writing has focused on the use of rap music in narrative therapy, working with persons entangled in the criminal injustice system in ways that maintain their dignity, narrative practice stories as pedagogy, a co-created questioning practice called reunion questions, and community healing strategies. He is co-author, with David Epston and Tom Carlson, of the first book on Contemporary Narrative Therapy released in June 2022 entitled, “Reimagining Narrative Therapy Through Practice Stories and Autoethnography.” The book is part of the “Writing Lives” series with Routledge publishing. He also completed a video series of his clinical work in June of 2024 for Psychotherapy.net entitled, “Reimagining Multiculturalism: A Contemporary Narrative Approach. Travis has been fortunate to facilitate workshops and speak in Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Hong Kong, India, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, United Kingdom, and United States.

Rania El Mugammar

Accountability Beyond Punishment: Relational Repair, Power, and Ongoing Responsibility

Rania El Mugammar (she/they) is a Sudanese Artist, Liberation Educator, Abolitionist, Anti-oppression Consultant , multidisciplinary performer, speaker and published writer. Her work explores reproductive justice, transformative justice & abolition, art as liberation and digital justice.

As a writer, Rania’s work explores themes of identity, womanhood, Blackness, flight, exile, migration, belonging, gender, sexuality and beyond. Rania’s primary mediums are poetry, spoken word and oral storytelling. She is a published poet, storyteller and playwright. Rania is deeply interested in poetic form and the auditory texture of words as well as the visual/aesthetic impact of language and form.

Rania is an experienced anti-oppression, abolition and liberation educator and consultant who is unflinchingly committed to decolonization and freedom as the ultimate goals of her work. She has worked extensively with contemporary arts institutions, STEM based enterprises, media organizations, educational institutions and community/grassroots spaces.

Website: www.raniawrites.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/raniaelmugammar
Pateron: www.patreon.com/raniawrites
Twitter: @raniawrites
Instagram: @rania.writes

John Tolentino

Community Response as Care: Grief, Collective Action, and Healing Beyond Institutions

John Tolentino (he/they) is a Filipino queer therapist, educator, and community organizer offering virtual counselling through John Tolentino Counselling and Consulting. His work is rooted in relational, trauma-informed care that gently resists isolation and centers connection, care, and collective healing.

John is the founder of the BC Filipino Therapist Association and was involved with the Vancouver Filipino Emergency Response Team (VanFilEmerg), where he has supported community-led responses to collective trauma during the April 26th Tragedy.

For the Liberatory Practices Summit, John joins Josh Rasalan to reflect on Filipino community-based healing and what it can offer therapists, practitioners and human service workers who are longing to practice in ways that are more communal, responsive, and grounded in care.

Josh Rasalan

Community Response as Care: Grief, Collective Action, and Healing Beyond Institutions

Josh Rasalan (any pronouns) is a Filipino settler living on the ancestral, unceded territories of the Semiahmoo, Katzie, and Kwantlen First Nations. Coming from a lineage of educators, Josh is honoured to continuously (un/re)learn and share knowledge, wisdom, and stories bountiful within our communities.

Josh sits on the board of directors with Pinoy Pride Vancouver Society, an intergenerational social and support group for queer Filipinos, and NPC3 Society, producing events centering emerging Filipino artists and their stories. By day, Josh works as a case manager with Ribbon Community. By night, Josh can be found watching TikToks until he passes out sleeping.

Josh is grateful to journey through conversation with John, Abby, and Bhupie to ponder on unanswerable questions and explore the gray areas of providing care for the communities around us.

Jennifer-Lee Koble

Summit Reflections – Live Debrief Guest Facilitator

Jennifer-Lee Koble (she/her) is a Metis/Cree and mixed European mother to 3 adults, aunty, daughter, niece, cousin, friend and mama to two fur babies. These relationships root her – bringing responsibilities and joy. She is a therapist, facilitator, consultant, supervisor, and professor. In all relationships, she holds a clear lens of history, liberation and kinship care.

In support of all Jennifer-Lee endeavors she receives guidance from ancestors, Elders, many teachers, and creation itself. She is also grateful to the practices and moorings of Somatic Abolitionism and years of mentorship from Dr. Resmaa Menakem.

She lives on the occupied shared homelands of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm , Skwxwú7mesh , Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh peoples and committed to be here in a good way -she calls the open prairies home.

What you'll leave with:

Orientation

Not a map with clean lines, but a felt sense of where you’re standing. A clearer orientation around ethical responsibility that helps you locate yourself in relation to power, harm, community, and care.

Co-Creation

New possibilities shaped through contact, friction, listening, and response. Possibilities that emerge between us. Ways forward that aren’t available in isolation, but come into being through shared presence, disagreement, care, and engagement with one another.

Unburdening

A loosening of what was never yours to carry alone. Relief from holding work that belongs to community and collective care, from mistaking isolation for professionalism, from believing you must metabolize structural harm in private.

Relationship

A renewed sense of relational possibility. A remembering that care moves through connection, that accountability is shaped in relationship, and that practice doesn’t have to be solitary.

Integrity

Not more answers, but perhaps better questions. Fewer conclusions, fewer scripts, fewer performances. A grounded integrity in how you practice and how you stay in the work without abandoning yourself or others.

For therapists, by therapists.

Learn from communities of resistance to address systemic oppression in therapeutic practice, build contextual consciousness, and realign with collective ethics.

This summit has been created by therapists for therapists. Connect with co-creation in resisting colonial harms, while integrating liberatory practices into our work by centering collective care, liberatory imagination, and anti-oppressive practices in therapy.

With the All-Access Pass, you’ll get unlimited access through 2026, to all of the conversations and presentations from the Leaning into Liberatory Practice Summit.

Once you enroll, you’ll get an email with login instructions. Set up your password and you’re in! If you’re logging in with us in real time, the video module will drip each day. Make sure you engage with our discord community as you go through the material!

If You’re Unsure

That’s okay. We’re engaging with hard questions in a time of escalating violence, political repression, and widespread harm. These conditions shape our work whether or not they are explicitly named.

This summit can’t promise resolution or reassurance. It won’t make the contradictions of practicing inside harmful systems disappear, and it is not meant to.

What it offers instead is a shared container where those contradictions can be named, held, and examined in relationship with others who are, like you, also not looking for shortcuts.

If you are carrying questions that feel too heavy to hold alone, welcome. Hesitation doesn’t disqualify you from this space.

Meet your facilitators

Abby Chow, (She/Her)

I found my way to this work through exploring and navigating my own relational harms through the lens of privilege and systemic oppression. Aside from my counselling practice and various front line roles, my work primarily involves providing clinical supervision and business consulting to justice-oriented practitioners and agencies, as well as teaching at various local graduate programs and being an operations team member for Healing in Colour.

Bhupie Dulay (She/Her)

Bhupie noticed a shift where practitioners are heavily focused on modality and interventions and have moved away from the relational aspects of therapy. She is thrilled about this summit as she hopes it will support folx currently doing this work in a more relational manner but also invite us to reconsider how we are engaging in the therapeutic space.

Your Unlearning gives back

Aside from compensating speakers for their work, proceeds from the Leaning into Liberatory Practice summit will also go towards supporting lower cost counselling for SDQTBIPOC+ folx at Prospect Counselling and local mutual aid efforts in so-called BC.

If you’re already leaning yes, registering now gives you full access to the conversations and a place in the live virtual debrief.

Join the Summit

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Feedback & Testimonials

Thoughts from your community

This was hands down my favourite...

This was hands down my favourite course. It was the safest, most honest, brutal-yet-compassionate social justice environment I’ve ever experienced, and was a place for challenging discomfort as growth as well as the emotional support needed for that discomfort.

I am incredibly inspired by the...

I am incredibly inspired by the programs Bhupie & Abby have built at Prospect. This is the kind of wide ranging justice-oriented learning that I wish I had access to in graduate school, during my time as a student or a professor. I am excited for all those who take part in the programs, for all the clients who will benefit from encountering more competent and just practitioners, and for our field to benefit collectively from the Prospect’s unique offerings and contributions to the practice of justice seeking therapy.

Not only is the Justice Fundamentals training...

Not only is the Justice Fundamentals training helpful in my work with clients, they have also been healing for me as well. The discussions and learning materials help give me and my clients so much language to describe our experiences, and help point us onto a path towards holistic healing.

The videos are so helpful, especially...

The videos are so helpful, especially when you talk through examples – it feels fresher in my mind and inspires me to start thinking about different ways to have my practice grounded in justice.

I'm so excited that I'm...

I’m so excited that I’m part of this community and see what comes of it. Everything you’ve put out has been so compassionately thought provoking and ACTIONABLE. I’ve already started talking to clients about it and have printed them some of your newsletters.

Thank you for your...

Thank you for your encouragement and support. Your passion for social justice is a source of inspiration and contribution to my growth in this profession.

To see it all put together like this is...

To see it all put together like this is a different experience. There’s so much more to know than I thought. It’s complicated but you make it clear and thought-provoking.

I love that it always comes back to...

I love that it always comes back to action. People just talk about understanding too much. It’s time we do something about it and this tells us what we can do about it.

I always have the framework...

I always have the framework and the checklist on my phone. I use it to make sure justice is part of my day. I think it makes a big difference to have it set up like that.

I'm loving all the ROj content...

I’m loving all the ROJ content – it’s so beneficial to follow along, take the trainings and listen to the podcast. Appreciate you both dedicating so much time to this project and I’m pumped to be in the community.

I learned so much from...

I learned so much from this course and I am excited to continue learning and growing beyond the classroom. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and supporting us all in our journeys of becoming socially responsible counsellors. I feel lucky to be part of a community with instructors that care as much as you do.