This art-informed, reflexive, autobiographical inquiry explores the struggles of a feminist academic committed to transformative adult education and subsistence learning, while engaged in program planning for fire service education. The author chronicles how her approach within the applied practice in a traditional, male dominant workplace setting is shaped by her rural Canadian heritage, the move from an isolated rural location to an urban setting followed by academic research in motherwork as a site of adult learning. By looking for day-to-day opportunities to promote equity, increased tolerance and mutual respect, the author describes the struggles and joys of her lived experience within a workplace where oppression is prominent, while seeking to contribute to the transformation of societal structures that create barriers, exclude or oppress.