Trauma-Focused
We recognize that childhood sexual trauma is complex, affecting mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being. We create time and space to explore and address the impacts of the trauma on all parts of self.
Strength-Based
We believe that everyone has value and see the potential in all. We facilitate the healing journey by drawing on individual resilience, strength, capacity, and resource.
Anti-Oppressive Lens
We understand the presence and harm of systemic forms of oppression. We will work consciously and actively to reduce systemic oppression in our practices, learning from our mistakes. We are committed to collaborating with each other and the community to create a more just world.
Relationship-Based
We believe healing and transformation happens within healthy relationships and meaningful connections. We place the therapeutic relationship at the core of our clinical model and encourage people to develop healthy support systems and connections within their community.
Person-Led
We believe people are the experts of their own lives and each person has the right to make their own life choices. We encourage people to set their own goals and lead their healing process.
Cultural Safety
We believe in creating an environment where everyone can thrive and where all parts of our identities are valued. We are committed to being inclusive and striving for Cultural Safety, where everyone is welcomed and honoured.
Statement on Safe(r) Spaces
Workers and visitors at Heartwood Healing Centre hold a shared responsibility to create an environment that is welcoming to all, and where each person here feels accepted, included, seen, heard, valued, and safe. As an agency, we are dedicated to social justice, we value equity and inclusion, and we insist on a culture of respect. At Heartwood Healing Centre, racism, sexism, queerphobia, xenophobia, transphobia, ableism, classism, fatphobia and other forms of hate and discrimination are not tolerated.
Harm Reduction Statement
Heartwood Healing Centre views harm reduction as a philosophy, belief, value system, practice, and approach that seeks to prevent or minimize harms through the work we do.
We follow the lead of the Manitoba Harm Reduction Network that states: “Harm reduction is looking at the big picture, to the systems and policies that create harm for people who use drugs and working to change those systems” (htps://mhrn.ca/harm-reduction).
Heartwood Healing Centre aims to reduce harms and increase access to our organization that is inherently entwined within the historical context of a colonial Canada.
We acknowledge this as part of social structures, systems, policies, and practices that make substance use harmful, and that disproportionately harm people who have experienced colonial violence and/or racialization. We commit to advocating to expose and challenge them.
We offer support, advocacy, dignity, and respect to all; continuously challenge our personal biases; and meet clients where they are at, without judgement and assumptions. We recognize and affirm that we all have choices and that we all take risks in our lives and understand that complex trauma removes choice at times.
As part of our commitment in trauma-informed care, it is important to us to destigmatize coping mechanisms in hopes of reducing shame, recognizing that everyone needs medicine, and it is not up to us to tell people what their medicines are.