The Sunflower story
Sunflower’s founders first met while co-facilitating a food justice community of practice. The joy, support, shared leadership, and values alignment we found in each other planted the seeds for the Sunflower Facilitation and Counselling Co-op.
Our co-operative
We have each experienced many years of working alone–a reality for many consultants, facilitators, and counsellors today. Creating Sunflower Co-op was about shifting that experience and growing a collective of support, shared learning and cooperation for ourselves and others.
When it came time to find the right home for our collaboration, it was clear that our values fit best with becoming a worker co-operative. We love the Canadian Worker Co-op Federation’s quote: “Worker co-ops are a radical break from the conventional business model.”
Democratic governance, creating employment for members, collective ownership, and breaking away from creating profit for investors are all parts of being a worker co-op that mean a lot to us.
Our values
At Sunflower we believe that supporting peaceful and growing relationships with self and others can help shape a more just and joyful world.
Our values include:
Engaging in collective action and co-creating just and joy-filled spaces
Supporting peaceful and growing relationships with self and others
Cultivating responsive relationships
Co-designing facilitation processes, experiential events and communities of practice
Accessibility
We believe fostering an accessible workplace will allow us to make our best work possible. Core to our accessibility practice is ongoing reflection on our own shifting needs and abilities, and our different ways of learning and doing. We are guided by the disability justice movement, a group led by people who are marginalized by systems of oppression in multiple ways.
Here are some of our core accessibility practices:
Checking in on accessibility needs
Offering grounding and centring practices to settle our nervous systems
Seeking informed consent and leaving room for questions, concerns and curiosities
Offering choices, including choices to sit-back, observe, witness, and reflect
Appreciative listening to feedback
Reflecting on and shifting practices as we learn from all who we work with
We welcome your feedback on the accessibility of our practice and our website. Please contact us to share your experience.
Interested in working with us?
We look forward to meeting other counsellors and facilitators whose values align with our own. If you are interested in learning more about our workers’ co-operative please get in touch!