“Your body of work is everything you create, contribute, affect, and impact.”
— Pamela Slim, Body of Work
Pamela Slim's Body of Work changed the way I saw my career — and myself.
It helped me see experience as something much bigger than the jobs we've held. It's also what we've learned, created, contributed to and lived through, and the people, places and questions that have shaped us along the way.
This is a snapshot of mine.
25+ years of working with people and organizations
My career has taken me across the charitable, higher education, tourism and community sectors, with progressive leadership roles spanning philanthropy, communications and marketing, community engagement and organizational change.
I've led multidisciplinary teams and multimillion-dollar portfolios, worked alongside senior leaders and boards, built partnerships and campaigns, led national programs, facilitated complex strategic planning processes and raised significant philanthropic support.
Gathering + facilitation
For more than 15 years, facilitation and dialogue have been woven through my work.
I've led facilitation for SFU's Tales from Terminal City, facilitated at the Karen Armstrong Compassion in Religion Conference, worked in dialogue and peace research, co-facilitated Nipissing University's most recent strategic planning process, and designed gatherings for teams, leaders and communities.
My formal learning in Peace & Conflict Studies and Dialogue & Civic Engagement continues to inform this work, alongside ongoing facilitation practice and education and an international network of facilitators I continue to learn with and from.
Life experience + learning
Some of my deepest learning hasn't come through work at all.
Experiences of loss, trauma and grief led me toward embodiment and a deeper curiosity about the body, nature, movement, creativity, intuition and different ways of knowing.
That curiosity has also shaped what I've chosen to study, including the Feminine Embodiment Coaching program at the School of Embodied Arts and the Intuitive Leadership Intensive with Sydney Blum and Josh Litwin. My ongoing learning and practice also draws from ancestral modalities and ways of knowing.
Together, these experiences have added another dimension to how I listen, facilitate, lead and understand people.
What Inspires Me
I've always followed my curiosity and intuition toward the things that light something up in me.
I'm interested in people and place, and in how the spaces around us shape the way we experience ourselves and one another. That curiosity takes me into urban and city design, public space and public art, nature and the seasons, storytelling, making and the creative process, expression and field facilitation.
I'm also drawn to cyclical and relational ways of being, learning and knowing, including those connected to my own ancestry. I find myself returning again and again to questions of belonging, the stories we carry, and what helps us live alongside people whose lives and experiences may be very different from our own.
This is part of why Birch + Bloom is an evolving practice. I don't want it to become a fixed methodology or formula. What I'm learning, noticing, experiencing and exploring finds its way into the spaces I create. No two are quite the same.
That curiosity is the heartbeat of Birch + Bloom. It keeps the practice alive, evolving and distinctly its own.