Movement Classes for Support Workers are led by Rianne Švelnis and Alexa Mardon: dancers and dance teachers who have worked as frontline support workers in various capacities.

The classes support movement, play, connection and strategies for those of us doing frontline support. We invite self-identified support workers, with the understanding that support work takes many forms, and is often not professionalized or even acknowledged.

We have been developing and facilitating these classes intermittently since 2017. We recognize that workers increasingly experience “burnout”: a reasonable nervous system response to unsustainable and violent systemic conditions. We recognize that burnout is not an individual failure to cope with crisis but rather a symptom of larger violent systemic structures at work. As care workers, artists and facilitators, we work to learn from and move in solidarity with drug users, people without safe shelter, people targetted by police violence including those incarcerated, Indigenous land defenders, Palestinian resistance and solidarity organizers and all those impacted by colonial and capitalist violence. We learn from abolitionists, from Black, Indigenous and Disability Justice organizers.

Our belief is that moving together with awareness can help us notice that we have access to choices when we might otherwise feel choiceless. With the help of one another we can practice and access this responsive agility both within ourselves and in the collective.

The goal is not to ‘fix’ or ‘get you back to work’. These classes include exhaustion and refusal as part of what we are moving with. We hope to build solidarity amongst workers, and co-create practices of being together even when in separate places, weaving fibers of strengthening bonds between us.