Co Culture is a consultancy working with
organisations and practitioners who want to develop their capacity for inclusive practice
empowered individuals who want to develop strategies and skills for anti-oppressive practice.
Social location, power disparity and systemic issues are rarely acknowledged and attended to in therapeutic care and other care professions. As a result, folks with mixed marginalised identities are often required to mask, code switch or hide parts of their experience from the very people who are providing their care. This can become a challenging situation for both client and care provider where intentions may be shared but the barriers and challenges to building authentic relationships are often invisible. Co-cultural communication theory is a framework for understanding common adaptations in communication used by people who are have lived experience of marginalisation. These necessary protective adaptations often form a relational barrier that undermines the very outcomes clients (and practitioners) seek.
Co Culture offers a culturally inclusive and holistic approach to working with people, built on the knowledge that the human nervous system is wired to thrive in safe, equitable and dignified relationship with others.
Through supervision, coaching, training and facilitation, Co Culture supports practitioners to develop the necessary skills and critical awareness to attend to power disparity in their relationships with clients. This approach creates safety, strengthens relationships and positions the client as an agent in their own growth.
Foundational to Co Cultural Practice is Culturally Safe and Responsive Collaboration developed by Rachel Edwardson and David Vadiveloo (CSR Practice Book to be published 2023) as well as a multitude of wisdoms, practices, knowledge systems and cultural movements.
The impacts from social systems, political systems and inter-generational inheritance on nervous systems are often misinterpreted, pathologised and missed in relational work.
Tulou ki te tagata fenua. The beginning of healing, learning and belonging is acknowledgement and so we begin by acknowledging that we live and make life on the sacred, unceded lands of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nations. We bow our heads to the land, to the ancestors, elders, children, mothers, leaders and warriors of these nations. We acknowledge the sovereignty, and resilience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities across this continent. We acknowledge and stand with sovereign people across the world in their fight to protect land and community from the unrelenting violence of colonisation. We acknowledge our ancestors, and locate ourselves within an ancient story of survival and love as we rise to the responsibility of healing, resisting and repairing the wounds that separate us from land, each other and from our own bodies. Tulou ki te tagata fenua.
