Welcome To Venturous Counselling & Consulting!

Venturous is a purpose-led collective,

built on two fundamental pillars: multidisciplinary practice and justice-oriented action. Believing in the mind-body-community connection, our work with you goes beyond the talk.

Nurture your inner work with our collective healing initiatives or work with one of our individual practitioners through culturally responsive, context-aware, intersectional therapy as you build your support network.

We also believe there’s more to healing than therapy alone. Aside from our free resources we’re also on a mission to bring community back into mental health.

Bringing Community Back into Mental Health

Providing therapy and wellness services is only one part of our work

You always get the best of us because our therapists support one another in community, in the ongoing unlearning of oppressive systems, and in continual clinical training. We also invest resources back into the communities we serve, strengthening the conditions that make healing possible.

The heart of our work is community, and our team is no different. When you access support here, you’re supported by a collective of justice-oriented therapists committed to walking alongside you as we make sense of things together.

Our therapists work within a shared clinical philosophy that is grounded in a community accountability model to continually root our work in relational care, liberatory praxis, and anti-oppressive practice.

Let’s be part of something bigger, together. We want to thoroughly disrupt the industry that roots problems solely within you while making social responsibility optional for practitioners. It’s fundamental to our work, not an afterthought.

bringing it back to you

What our queer-, BIPOC-, and neurodivergent-led approach means for you

Most of our field was built to help people adapt to conditions that were never designed for their survival, and to call that adaptation “health”. We are interested in a different question — what has it cost you to keep functioning inside systems that were never built to hold you, and what parts of you have been asked to carry that cost alone? What would it shift for you if you were able to question the context and the assumptions keeping you stuck?

In our work with you, we...

Won’t ask you to translate your gender, culture, how your brain works, or family obligations before we can hear you or acknowledge you in the full complexities of what it means to be you
Won’t treat your survival strategies as symptoms to be shamed
Won’t locate the problem just in your nervous system while ignoring what your nervous system has been responding to
Won’t default to worksheets, homework, or protocols that don’t actually consider the context that makes the problem a problem in the first place
Won’t frame rest, refusal, slowness, or rage as things to regulate away because they’re “impolite” or “unprofessional”
Won’t pretend to have clinical neutrality — because it doesn’t exist, and serves to further oppression within the counselling setting
Won’t ask you to code-switch, be palatable, professional, or “well” in ways that require erasing parts of yourself

An anti-oppressive therapy means we will...

Treat your context — race, class, gender, disability, migration, colonial history, capitalist labour conditions — as significant factors influencing the way you’ve been trained to be in the world, and what you’ve had to endure
Trust that your body’s timing is more accurate than any treatment plan’s
Hold contradictions without collapsing them: love and rupture, belonging and grief, wanting to stay and needing to leave
Recognize that much of what gets called “dysfunction” is adaptation to something designed to be unlivable, but you live through it anyway
Name power in the room, including ours
Sit with anger (and rage, and grief, and all the hard systemically influenced emotions) as information and experience to witness and honour, not something to redirect
Move at a pace your nervous system can actually metabolize
Support you in questioning the frameworks in life — including therapy’s — that told you something was wrong with you, and only you; frameworks that keep you stuck in cycles you feel like you can’t escape

Connect with us

Meet the Venturous Team

Renee Liang (she/her)

Lower Cost Counselling

Supervised by Bhupie Dulay, MA, RCC-ACS & Abby Chow, MA, RCC-ACS

Work with Renee if you think about everything deeply and carry responsibility for things that were never yours to hold. If you like to reflect, see things from a new angle, and want someone honest and steady in your corner — often with some humour when things get heavy. Renee works with reflective, insight-oriented people navigating self-doubt, cultural complexity, relational trauma, and cultural grief. Her approach is direct but not directive: she’ll say the straightforward thing, then work with you on how it actually fits, because you know yourself best. She pays attention to the systems around you, too, helping sort what’s yours to carry from what isn’t.

This is not therapy that hands you the answers, takes an expert stance, or rushes you toward quick solutions. It centres introspection over tidy conclusions, and treats healing as something that isn’t linear — there’s no shame in revisiting the same ground again.

Renee works with youth and adults through individual and relationship counselling.

Art + Somatic Therapy

Parveen Boyal, MCP, RCC (she/her)

Work with Parveen if you want a space where you can say the thing you’ve been editing in your head, and you want help meeting it with honesty and self-compassion. If anxiety about how you’re seen in the world has started running the show, or your relationship with your body feels like something you’re surviving instead of living in, Parveen offers a space to slow down, untangle those stories, and build something more compassionate in their place.

Parveen works well with people who appreciate direct conversation, but also need a therapist who understands how much care it takes to be honest with yourself. Sessions often move between art, body awareness, and everyday life, including pop culture and whatever you’re watching lately. If a Netflix reference helps something land, great. If a question needs to be asked plainly, she’ll ask it with care.

This is a space where curiosity and compassion come first, and where challenge is used to help you understand yourself more clearly, not to push you harder than you’re ready for. This is not therapy that avoids difficult topics, rushes insight, or mistakes self-criticism for growth.

Parveen works with adults through individual sessions.

Art + Walk and Talk Therapy

Julianna Lei, MCP, RCC (she/her)

Work with Julianna if you’ve spent a lot of your life translating yourself between cultures, roles, or worlds (D&D anyone?), and you want room to think out loud without flattening the complexity.

Julianna often works with clients exploring bicultural identity, belonging, and self-definition. Her sessions draw on art therapy, walk & talk, and narrative practice, and tend to suit people who make sense of their lives through stories, patterns, and shared reference points.

This work pays attention to the roles you’ve inherited, the ones you’ve outgrown, and the ones you’re still choosing, without rushing that process or forcing it into neat conclusions.

This is not therapy that strips context, pushes tidy answers, or insists everything be translated into clinical language.

Julianna works with youth + adults, individually and through relationship counselling.

Art, Play + Somatic Therapy

Sarada Bhagavatula, MA, RCC (she/her)

Work with Sarada if you’re worn down, emotionally overloaded, or disconnected from yourself, and you want support that feels gentle and spacious, without being passive.

There’s a kind of knowing that lives below language. In the body, in play, in the image that surfaces before the explanation arrives. If you’ve been white-knuckling your way through life and you’re starting to wonder what it would feel like to slow down without everything falling apart, Sarada’s work begins there. With curiosity, with gentleness, with the belief that creativity is how we find our way back to ourselves.

Sarada works with adults and relationships who need room to slow down and listen to what their body and inner life are already doing. Her sessions draw on art, play, and somatic work, and often include thoughtful challenges that help loosen patterns without pushing you past your limits.

This work pays attention to burnout, grief, anxiety, and life transitions, while staying aware of how culture, power, and expectation shape what people carry. This is not therapy that confuses gentleness with avoidance or leaves everything exactly where it started.

Sarada works with adults, individually and through relationship counselling.

EMDR, Somatic + Walk & Talk Therapy

Jess Picco, MCP, RCC (she/her)

Work with Jess if you’ve spent a long time being told who you should be, and you’re more interested in figuring out what actually fits.

Jess works with individuals and relationships using art therapy and walk & talk approaches, grounded in queer and neurodivergent communities and ways of thinking. Sessions often suit people who think better while moving, talking side by side, or grounding conversations in shared interests and community life.

Jess brings a strong sense of connection to the work, shaped by team sports (rugby especially), queer community, and showing up with others over time. Therapy here is less about self-improvement and more about finding ways to live that don’t require constant self-editing.

This is not therapy that rewards conformity, sidelines difference, or treats independence as the only goal.

Jess works with adults and youth through individual & relationship counselling.

EMDR, Approved Clinical Supervisor & Clinical Director

Abby Chow, MA, RCC-ACS (she/her)

Work with Abby if you’re looking for a therapist or supervisor who names power directly, asks lots of questions, and uses humor to stay honest without pretending things aren’t hard.

Abby works primarily with therapists and practitioners who are trying to run their practices without selling their soul, while navigating ethical tension and the personal cost of working inside capitalist and colonial systems they don’t fully agree with. Many folx she works with are carrying grief: grief about the world as it is, about lives and careers that haven’t unfolded as imagined, about how to stay in relationship across difference, or are moving forward from relationships that were loving and harmful at the same time.

Sessions tend to hold seriousness and levity side by side. There’s space to be blunt, to ask questions that don’t have immediate answers, and to sort through what actually matters enough to act on. Abby often helps distill big ideas, political analysis, and clinical theory into practical next steps.

This is not therapy or supervision that avoids politics, prioritizes neutrality, or asks you to feel better at the expense of being honest.

Abby works with practitioners + businesses through clinical supervision and business consulting, and adults through individual and relationship counselling.

Why “Venturous”

Work with Venturous if you want therapy that takes context seriously and doesn’t ask you to separate your mental health from the world you’re living in.

Venturous is a queer-, BIPOC-, neurodivergent-led collective of Registered Clinical Counsellors supporting adults, relationships, and families across BC. Our clinicians work from shared commitments to anti-oppressive, queer-, BIPOC-, and neurodivergent-affirming care, while bringing different strengths, modalities, and styles to their work.

Care at Venturous is grounded, relational, and practical. Sessions may draw on somatic, art-based, play-based, narrative, EMDR, or nature-based approaches depending on who you’re working with. Clients are matched based on fit with attention to how identity, power, and lived experience shape both distress and healing.

This is not therapy that treats suffering as apolitical, individualizes systemic harm, or asks you to adapt endlessly to what’s hurting you.

You exist in context, so it only makes sense that the problems you experience do too. Unfortunately, psychology commonly disregards this context and places the issue solely within you. But isn’t life already hard enough? Do you really need to take on MORE blame and shame for things that are not yours to carry?

“Venturous” means bold, daring, audacious, and enterprising. It represents the spirit of tenacity and the rebelliousness of thought required to speak truth to power both systemically and intrapersonally. Our commitment is to help you uproot the internalized beliefs that act as life support to the problems you experience; to support you in uncovering your ability to choose your story and build the world you want.

Let’s rebelliously subscribe to a different narrative.

More ways to connect

In the Media

Get Matched

Find Your Best-Fit Counsellor

We offer direct billing to select insurance providers & funded programs. Start with a free 15-minute video conversation or get your personalized recommendations straight to your inbox, with this 3-minute form.

We are uninvited settlers

occupying the stolen, ancestral territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), S’ólh Téméxw (Stó:lō), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), Qayqayt, and kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) peoples. Our relationship with these lands dictates our commitment to understanding and responding to the ongoing impacts of colonization in our practices in and out of the counselling room.

Learn more about the land you’re occupying at native-land.ca