Justice-Oriented
Business Consulting

Justice-oriented business consulting supports practitioners and organizations in Vancouver and Port Moody to build sustainable practices that align with their liberatory ethics. Most business consulting treats profit as the point and ethics as a constraint on it. This work starts somewhere else: your systems are either holding your ethics or eroding them, and most practitioners were never given the chance to build them deliberately.

Together we’ll build practical skills and unlearn default indoctrinations of oppression affecting your practice, while co-creating structures and procedures that align with your liberatory ethics. Through generative exploration that deconstructs capitalism, we’ll name power directly and distill big ideas, political analysis, and clinical theory into practical next steps from a systems and organizational, infrastructural lens.

Sessions can be virtual across BC or in-person at our Vancouver and Port Moody locations.

The biggest guiding force in our work together is co-creation. Instead of only asking you questions about what you would do in a particular circumstance or telling you the “right way” to move forward, we’ll explore, together, what your practice can look like.

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 difference would actually make a difference.

From starting up and managing your team, accounting and developing business structures, to branding and design support, know that you are not alone in this work. This is not consulting that avoids politics, prioritizes neutrality, or asks you to feel better at the expense of being honest.

Practice startup and structure, team building and people management, accounting and financial planning, branding and design, sliding scale and accessibility policy, community partnerships, marketing that doesn’t make you feel gross, internal systems and tooling, and the ongoing work of navigating capitalist healthcare systems without being fully absorbed by them.

At an organizational scale that also looks like infrastructure design, operational systems, and leadership support for teams trying to practice their values rather than post them.

Traditional business consulting optimizes for profit, competitive advantage, and individual success. It treats your business practices as neutral tools and your ethics as a preference you bring to them.

This work shifts counselling from a symptom-reduction profession to a world-building one, and treats your business structures the same way. What you charge, who you can afford to see, how you pay people, what you compromise to keep the doors open: those are political choices, and they either reinforce systemic oppression or resist it. We integrate that analysis into the decision-making rather than bolting it on afterward, and explore liberatory practices like sliding scale models, community partnerships, and collective care.

Yes. Group consulting works for practices, organizations, or groups of practitioners wanting to work through justice-oriented business approaches together. It allows for peer learning, shared accountability, and building community around ethical business practice.

It tends to be particularly useful for teams trying to get aligned on values, organizations transforming how they operate, and practitioners who want solidarity with others doing similar work. Rates are reduced per participant and can be customized to your organization’s needs.

Yes. That includes business structure and legal considerations, financial planning and budgeting, branding and website development, sliding scale and accessibility policies, intake and assessment processes, community partnerships and referral networks, and navigating insurance and billing.

Starting from scratch is the easiest time to do this well. You get to build systems that hold your ethics from the beginning, rather than trying to retrofit them into structures that were never designed for it.

Abby Chow (MA, RCC-ACS, PhD Candidate) has spent the last decade in clinical practice and business operations. She founded Venturous Counselling and Reflecting on Justice, co-founded Prospect Counselling, and is part of the operations team at Healing in Colour. She teaches and supervises counsellors-in-training at local graduate programs, and is in ongoing clinical supervision with Vikki Reynolds.

Before becoming a therapist, she was formally trained in graphic design, marketing, and business management. She’s worked with individual practitioners, group practices, practicum programs, non-profits, essential services, and organizations to develop new human and infrastructural systems.

We don’t resolve it. There’s no version of running a business inside capitalism where you come out clean, and I’d be weary of any consulting that promises otherwise.

What we do is work through the messiness of our complicity directly rather than pretending it isn’t there: sustainable financial models that don’t exploit clients or practitioners, accessibility that doesn’t require you to burn out to provide it, community partnerships that share resources, and finding ways to resist and transform systems from within while meeting your own needs for survival. Together, we can workshop and create through a systemic, political lens that recognizes the messiness of being complicit, and how we can move forward.

Both. Some folx come for a one-time consultation on a specific question. Others work intensively during startup or a major transition, then come back periodically as new things come up. Ongoing monthly or quarterly check-ins are also an option if you want support staying aligned as your practice or organization evolves.

Frequency and duration depend on your needs, your goals, and the complexity of what you’re building.

Yes, virtually across British Columbia, and in-person in Vancouver and Port Moody. You can switch between them depending on what you need.

The co-creative nature of this work translates well to virtual sessions, and for practitioners outside the Lower Mainland or folx for whom travel is a barrier, it’s often the more accessible option.