Kat Townshend, MSW, RSW (she/her/elle) is a social worker, educator, community organizer, and serves in the voluntary role of Ottawa & Area Local Engagement Network Co-Ambassador, alongside Titi, with the Ontario Association of Social Workers. Her work focuses on creating spaces for reflection, connection, accountability, and collective care within social work and community practice.

Kat brings experience across social services, education, community development, and nonprofit settings, including work alongside Indigenous communities and Indigenous-led initiatives. Her practice is informed by ongoing learning around decolonizing social work, reconciliation, settler accountability, and relationship-building, with attention to how colonial systems and dominant organizational practices continue to shape social work, workplaces, and community services. Her current work includes supporting Indigenous-led and cross-cultural initiatives, developing reconciliation-focused learning opportunities, and creating spaces where social workers can critically reflect on power, positionality, systems, and their responsibilities within practice.

A growing focus of Kat’s work is the development of Communities of Practice that can help sustain wellness, connection, and collective care over time. She is interested in moving beyond individualized approaches to burnout and resilience toward relational and community-based approaches that help practitioners reflect together, share knowledge, strengthen supportive networks, and respond collectively to the systemic and workplace conditions that affect well-being.

Within Building the Bridge, Kat contributes to project development, consultation, outreach, and the design of an equity-centred framework for professional debriefing with social work students, new graduates, and early career practitioners. She is especially interested in how debriefing spaces can move beyond individual coping to support shared reflection, accountability, connection, and more sustainable ways of practicing social work.