Peers is excited to offer a counselling and wellness program!
Sessions for current or former sex workers. There is no formal limit on number of sessions at this time, but counsellors do have limited service hours.
To access the counselling program send an email to counselling@peers.bc.ca
Peers Counsellors:
Flora Pagan (she/her)
Flora has lived on Songhees and Esquimalt territory since 2010. Born in Scotland, she and her family moved to Treaty 7 territory (Calgary) where she grew up. Before becoming a counsellor she spent many years working in low-barrier mental health, substance use, and shelter services. Flora has been connected to Peers since 2013 when she began volunteering on the Board of Directors, supporting the agency and local sex worker rights activism.
Flora believes there is always hope for healing. She uses somatic, social justice, and attachment-based counselling approaches to build trust, resourcing, and dignity. Her training and experience has focused on treating relational trauma and her work is grounded in care and respect for her clients. She has worked with and for many communities and has experience exploring topics relating to trauma, ethnicity, disability, gender, sexuality, and class.
Flora holds a Master of Social Work degree from the University of Victoria and is a Registered Social Worker with the B.C. College of Social Workers.
Shannon Raison (she/her)
Shannon is a white settler of Polish, German, Irish, and English descent living on the unceded territories of the Quw’utsun peoples. She understands decolonization and healing as intimately interwoven. Both her work experience and training have focused on trauma and in particular sexualized violence. She brings a justice lens to her work and is continually learning how to be in better relationship to these lands and their peoples.
Her approach is both client-centered and trauma-informed, rooted in a deep belief in both individual and community capacity for healing and change. In addition to her background in trauma she is informed by somatic, relational, attachment, and response-based approaches and is trained in the use of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing).
Shannon works in the sex industry and is passionate about sex worker activism. She helped support the creation and facilitation of the Peer Counsellor Training Program at Peers in 2018.
Shannon holds a Masters of Counselling Psychology from the University of Victoria and is a Canadian Certified Counsellor (CCC) with the Canadian Counselling and Psychotherapy Association (CCPA).
Alex Wilson (she/her)
Alex is a queer, cis, able bodied, white settler currently working and residing on the traditional territory of the Songhees, WSANEC, and L’kwungen peoples (colonially known as Victoria).
She is completing my Masters of Education in Counselling at University of Northern British Columbia. She has lived experience in the sex industry and experience working in support services for people with disabilities and precariously housed populations.
As a counsellor in training, Alex’s goal is to create a judgment free space where you can feel comfortable exploring any topic, regardless of societal stigma or “taboo” narrative. She works from a client-centred and trauma-informed framework that is rooted in feminism, harm-reduction, anti-oppression and sex positive values. She is passionate about both strength-based and rights-based approaches that build trust, individual and community healing, and resourcing.
