PRACTITIONERS CIRCLE

An ongoing online circle of peer support for practitioners and care workers

Next Circle - Monday 14th July

10 - 12 PST • 1 - 3 pm EDT • 6 - 8 pm BST

If we are going to survive, we are going to need to tie our roots to other roots.

- Sophie Strand

The Practitioners Circle is a collaborative online space for care workers and providers to connect, gather together in conversation and mutual support, and nurture the humanity at the center of all forms of care.

We believe that if we are to grow and sustain ourselves in the vocation and labor of care work, we must put our roots down into shared soil and feed the connections that nourish our resilience. In supporting and receiving from each other as collaborators and co-conspirators, we also weave together to support each others’ clients, patients, families and communities in ever-widening circles across the world.

Practitioners Circle isn’t a class or a supervision group or a mentorship container, but is rather an explicitly non-hierarchical space in which we can come together, share our stories, ask our questions, listen and reflect, wonder and be curious together, ask for the support that we need, and offer the treasure of our diverse and varied experience back into the same pot.

Practitioners Circle is for you if:

  • You’re a care worker of *any* description and would be well-fed by gathering together with skilled peers across disciplines to kibitz, lean in on each other & hold the complexities, challenges and joys of care work as calling and labor;

  • You feel isolated in your professional practice and your experience of care work, and would like to participate in building a web of relationship with peers and colleagues;

  • You are seeking attuned feedback and reflection to support your work with clients and patients;

  • You want access to a community of like minded colleagues without having to sign up for a training;

  • You would benefit from connecting with peers across a broad spectrum of backgrounds, disciplines and perspectives.

Practitioners Circle is a membership group through our Substack.

If you would like to become a circle member now,

you can join us here.

The suggested membership fee is a suggestion ($200/annually, or less than $17/month).

In addition to everything that SET paid subscribers receive, Practitioners Circle members will additionally receive:

  • Invitation to a live online meet up every month;
  • Our direct support in response to questions and issues that arise in your clinic and practice;
  • An active, ongoing community forum for members through the subscriber chat on our Substack.

We are social animals, and when isolation is a central part of the poison, togetherness is always part of the antidote. Being witnessed and witnessing others in the spirit of mutual support is a profound act of repair.

In this way we build culture, with power, as we intend.

Facilitators

  • Pamela Samuelson (she/they) is a Los Angeles-based body literacy and sexuality educator, somatic practitioner, full spectrum doula and manual therapist specializing in trauma-informed pelvic care, practicing under the banner of Embodywork LA.

    In addition to SET, she is the co-founder of the nonprofit Center for the Advancement of Body Literacy, whose mission is to make empowering, evidence-based body literacy and sex education available to all who want it.

    She is a community self-defense instructor, a longtime lay herbalist, and a torch-bearer for the feminist healthcare movement.

    When she isn’t holding bodies, teaching, writing and organizing with her beloveds, she can be found climbing tall things with her kid, singing crunchy harmonies, drinking tea in all seasons, reading 7 books simultaneously and befriending the local cats.

  • Emily Carson (she/her) is an Oxford-based somatic practitioner (Acupuncturist and Craniosacral Therapist), postnatal doula and somatic-centred educator. She works with an integrative, trauma-informed approach, working with a special interest in gynecological and perinatal care. She co-facilitates the Oxford homebirth group.

    She is committed to writing and teaching that supports students, clients and families in relationship with embodied agency.

 FAQs

  • Our community includes birthworkers, MDs, nurses and nurse practitioners, manual therapists, bodyworkers, psychotherapists, occupational and physical therapists, somatic practitioners and educators, acupuncturists, movement and yoga therapists, deathworkers, and a whole spectrum of other skilled professionals. Anyone in a care profession who feels like they would benefit from a supportive space to bring questions and wonderings is whole-heartedly invited.

  • We have both found over the stretch of our time as practitioners (spanning 15 and 26 years, respectively) that being alongside our peers and being able to ask questions openly in a responsive, non-judgmental setting has been essential to our development as people and as providers, and has deeply informed how we consider and articulate the nature of our work as it evolves.

    We have observed the lack of collaborative, non-hierarchical spaces - professional development being largely hooked into ongoing training, supervision, and mentorship, which hold a very different weight and cost - and have really longed for this kind of dedicated, regular gathering ourselves.

    We also find enormous value in dialogue between practitioners across disciplines, and find that venues for this kind of regular sharing across lanes is absurdly rare - we are each quite siloed in our own worlds - and this is also an opportunity to engage in ongoing relationship with other providers with entirely different perspectives from your own.

  • No! The practitioner circle is an explicitly non-hierarchical peer mentorship space. It is not replicating the model of supervision but rather building a community, and the gifts that come when we stand shoulder to shoulder with others with different experiences, perspectives and background than our own and face a particular quandary or wondering together. Gatherings are intended as responsive, collaborative group dialogue with some faciitated structure for flow and ease.

  • If you are in the UK, absolutely. This would count as continuing professional development.

    In the US, whether this could be logged as continuing professional development will depend on your field of practice and your licensure, if any.

  • No, Practitioners Circle sessions are not recorded.

    Due to the confidential nature of the material that we will hold, we are keeping this offering live only.

  • Absoutely - if you have chosen to pay monthly as a founding member you can decide to cancel your membership / subscription at any time, and we will wish you all the best!