Jared likes stories. He founded Heartfire to hear your story, and support you to revise, reauthor, and retell it to transform your life, connect with community, and realize larger goals. Stories heal us, teach us, and empower us to make change. Just about everything in life comes down to the stories we tell, the ones we’re told, and the ones we tell ourselves.
Jared is a Registered Social Worker with a degree from the University of Victoria, a Master’s from the University for Peace, and a Bachelor’s from the University of Saskatchewan. His focus has been on decolonization, gender and sexual diversity, and a relationship-based solidarity approach to healing, learning, and storytelling. As a therapist he is trained in trauma-informed care, narrative therapy, systems theory, harm reduction, motivational interviewing, stages of change, and dialectic/cognitive behavioural therapy (DBT/CBT) — and is particularly well-equipped to support you in matters of addiction, grief, depression, intergenerational trauma, and relationship issues including sex, intimacy, and divorce/break-ups.
Jared’s path to Heartfire began as a humanitarian journalist and educator for nearly a decade and in almost thirty (developing) countries — at the individual level, like working with survivors of weaponized rape and demobilized child soldiers — at the societal level, facilitating national and international decision makers toward genocide prevention and upholding human rights laws — and with institutions in-between, mentoring and organizing journalists and educators to address systemic problems. Jared continued this three-level approach in Canada working upstream in the social determinants of health for half a decade, collaborating with lived-experience experts, social justice gurus, and open-minded policy makers, toward transformative structural change in this settler-colonial society on Turtle Island.
How can a therapist listen to client stories day after day, of personal troubles and traumas caused by public issues and systems, and not work to change those larger root causes?
How can an activist work effectively and sustainably in those systems of policies and politics, without being consistently informed and recharged by the folks you’re trying to serve?
How can an educator create meaningful social change and teach for justice and humility, without keeping one foot in each world?
Heartfire was Jared’s answer to these three questions.
You can reach Jared at 306-384-3473 or heartfire.ca/team