At Alternatives Institute we are committed to:
- Community-based practice. Honoring the voices of the people who speak with us. Building on their commitments, knowledge and skill. Acknowledging that all of our personal lives and identities are collective community achievements.
- Trauma-informed responses to violence. Honoring people’s subjugated (e.g., invisibilized) knowledge of victimization, and, skill at responding to abuse, including men’s experience of violence and sexual abuse.
- Social justice accountability. Responding critically to replication of harm and re-traumatization in people’s lives, created by practices of unaccountability within our politics, departments and organizations.
- Cultural inclusivity and respect for GLBTI2 diversity. Responding to statistics on family violence across gender, culture and diversity of relationships.
- Young and adult men’s health and wellness. Responding to men’s lives holistically. Attending together in Nova Scotia to the social determinants of men’s health and wellness.
- Individualized personal, couple, family and community support across contexts. Providing continuums of individual, couple, family support where safe & desired, men’s gatherings, couples gatherings, camp weekends, consultancy, adult peer mentorship, referrals where desired, and long-term support…
- Professionalization of our skills through supervision, research and training. Continually learning within our work, in order to best assist people define and re-define their lives and identities, in their words, on their terms.
- De-centering our perceived political needs in order to work together and centre our communities needs. Taking sides perpetuates violence. Caring for everyone and working together helps us all respond to violence.
At Alternatives we meet with a wide diversity of people in diverse relationships with friends, partners, families and communities. Anyone can access conversations at Alternatives. You do not have to be referred by others. Half the folks who contact us are referred by agencies. Half come on their own, after hearing about us from family, friends or finding us on the internet. You can simply call us and book a time to meet, to see if we are a fit for you. Click here to go to our contact information. Click here to download our brochure.
“Everybody sees the man but nobody sees the little boy who was being abused.”
People with experience of looking for help often tell us about the frustration they have experienced in family, community and agency settings. People often speak of being: judged rather than supported, defined rather than given a chance to define their own lives, talked at rather than listened to, expected to “correctly” fit with a steering curriculum rather than consulted about how they steer their own lives.
We are committed to creating spaces together where people can feel safe to “show up”, say the “incorrect” things, and, question everything together with shared curiosity. To help with this, we are committed to questioning our own practices and being aware of replications of harm that can most likely occur when we as workers position ourselves against harm. If we workers don’t pay attention to this potential for “ethical trespass” (Weinberg, 2005) we will unknowingly replicate harm in our own practices with people, especially when we think we are being caring and helpful. At Alternatives, we are passionately concerned that all of us – workers and folks alike – be permitted to be uncertain together; be permitted to not know the right questions, or, the right answers. We are ethically committed to “consistent creativity”. (Fisher, 2010).
“We think ‘forgive and forget’ but forgiving myself helps me remember I did these things. Not forgiving myself would just drive me back to drinking because that was the only way I could forget. Being able to forgive myself rather than stay in either blame or shame and forgetting: It opened up the space to feel, to feel anything. You see, that’s the beauty of, that’s the beauty of getting better, that’s the beauty of the practice.”
This blog-based website is constantly under construction. Coming soon are documents and interviews about Alternatives’ historical development. We will track the learnings along the way from our beginning as a 1980’s feminist-informed domestic abuse intervention effort addressing men’s violence against women. And we will explore changes from the late 90’s onward, addressing complications of intention, identity and power in women and men’s lives. Learning from the people who speak with us constantly changes the landscape of our work.
Philosophically, our work applies a social “deconstruction” framework to help support critical reflection. French philosopher Paul Ricoeur thought of deconstruction as a way of uncovering the questions behind the answers of an accepted social practice. We engage all discourses in this work with critical reflection (e.g., psycho-education, narrative therapy, feminism, masculinities, mindfulness, etc.) This irreverent framework is intended to take great ethical care around replications of harm within mainstream and alternative practices positioned as “anti-violent”.
In the past decade, Alternatives director Art Fisher has become internationally recognized for his practice innovations in individual, group and community work responding to violence. Fisher will soon be releasing: The “present but invisible”: Responding to the significance of violence in a socially achieved world ©. This practical guidebook with maps for responding to violence is intended to support and invigorate workers in conversations together with individuals, families, groups and communities.
Alternatives is a non-profit community organization. Some of the programs of our organization are funded by the Nova Scotia Department of Community Services and donations.
