By Kenzie Love
When the members of a nascent worker co-op needed a name for their enterprise, the sunflower beckoned. This was partly due to the flower’s vibrant yellow colour’s potential to pop on a website, but it had a deeper significance as well. The members of Sunflower Facilitation and Counselling Co-op, as they ultimately decided to call themselves, were intent on doing work that was easeful, joyful, and purposeful, qualities that are attributes of sunflowers as well, so the name was a logical choice. Sunflower’s members and cofounders, Keira McPhee, Michelle Tsutsumi, and Zsuzsi Fodor, already had a long history of working on various projects together before the Co-op’s creation, so formalizing the structure as a co-op was another easy decision.
“We were already in cooperation and had shared work and practice spanning a decade of projects in cooperatives, non-profit, and government contexts,” says cofounder Zsuzsi Fodor. “So becoming a worker co-op felt really, really natural as a home for us to continue collaborating and cooperating.”
The co-op’s three members work together in a community of practice, a term referring to a group of people who share a common concern, a set of problems, or an interest in a topic and who come together to learn and work on their practice in that area. The Co-op offers both counselling services, for which they take a holistic therapy based approach, and facilitation through community centred, participatory processes. The community of practice approach was adopted to explore how holding space in counselling and facilitation can relate, providing an understanding of how these seemingly distinct work areas are actually interconnected. Instead of being a challenge, working in these two areas informs the other.
“The counselling elements really help us to name what is happening for people in the world today, and what is being carried by individuals, which is inevitably going to show up in any of our group facilitation processes,” says Michelle Tsutsumi, another cofounder.
Sunflower’s facilitation draws from Adaptive Strategy, Liberating Structures, and Sociocracy, approaches that resonate with their clients and collaborators, particularly other worker co-ops. Fodor recalls that a recent project they supported with members of The Cleaning Co-op was exactly the kind of work Sunflower set out to do.
“We’ve seen so much become possible for groups when we work in our emergent, adaptive and circle ways. So that was really beautiful to get to do that with another workers co-op. In particular, I know that that’s strengthening them and strengthening us to keep doing what we respectively do.”
As Fodor acknowledges, there’s no getting away from power dynamics in any context we’re working in, even co-ops. We’re steeped in racism, colonialism, capitalism, ableism, and so on. Sunflower Facilitation & Counselling Co-op sees its work as providing antidotes to dominant ways of meeting and organizing ourselves at work that are informed by sharing power analysis.
Joy and ease is still at the center for Sunflower when holding this kind of space, “part of this work is recognizing that we can hold both,” says Tsutsumi. “We can hold struggle and tension and also make space for connection and joy.”
Looking ahead, the sunflower will continue to guide its namesake in the work the Co-op’s members take on, the kind of work that got them to form Sunflower in the first place.
“We want to continue to do it,” says Fodor, “because it is what is easeful, purposeful, and joyful for us.”