Equity in Practice: Community Capacity Building
2021, Summit Towards Equity, Equity + Justice, Community Building
The power to make social change lives within community leaders.
SFU’s Community Capacity Building Certificate supports learners as they engage community by sharing lived experiences and adopting new tools for building projects and movements. Learners have been deepening their relationships with themselves, their communities and the land to create a project and move forward a change they’d like to see in the world.
We heard inspiring stories from the most recent cohort of learners and their growth as emerging leaders working towards equity in their communities.
Online Event
Part of Towards Equity
The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified inequities and exposed the deficiencies of our institutions. It has confirmed we must enact change and signaled that transformation is possible. What must we understand –and do– to recover equitably and reimagine our systems to confront the intersecting crises of inequality, systemic racism and climate change?
Towards Equity, SFU Public Square’s 2021 Community Summit Series took place online throughout the year and brought the university into conversation with local and global communities.
On this Page
Mateo Tobar
Mateo Tobar is an Ecuador-based social innovator with a focus on reducing the gap of opportunities in developing countries. With experience in civil society, academia and the private sector, Mateo is a true believer that to achieve sustainable and equitable development there must be a multisector collaborative approach. His project will focus on creating a more participatory and proactive society through the promotion of youth leadership. The project will be run by the Youth Education Lab, an initiative that he co-created with his community in Ecuador and expects to become one of the few social enterprises focused on youth in Ecuador.
Jónína Kirton
Jónína Kirton is a celebrated Métis and Icelandic poet, mentor, BIPOC Auntie at the SFU Writer's Studio, and champion of peer support as a component of community healing and artistic work. Her presentation will include a poem from her most recent collection, An Honest Woman, which was a finalist in the 2018 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. A late-blooming poet, Jónína was 61 when she received the 2016 City of Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award for an Emerging Artist in the Literary Arts category. Her life story is one of learning to care for self and community during times of transition and complexity.
Jshandeep Jassal
Jshandeep Jassal is co-director at Solid State Community Industries and a community builder with expertise in creating workers' cooperatives, mentoring racialized youth, and promoting intergenerational knowledge sharing between youth, families and organizations. At Solid State and in community, Jshandeep's work fosters connections across generations and within communities using an asset-based approach. Jshandeep’s project will focus on opportunities to reconnect with culture, heritage and community after experiences of racism and intolerance, particularly for South Asian youth and those impacted by intergenerational trauma in the Punjabi/Sikh community.
Emerald Asuncion and Desmond Williams
Emerald Asuncion is an activist, decolonizing artist and advocate for collective healing whose work seeks to uplift her diasporic communities from the island archipelago colonially known as The Philippines, as well as her wider community in the DTES/Chinatown neighbourhood. Emerald's work in communications has spanned sectors including retail, television, environmental conservation, urban planning and community health, with a focus on promoting healing and justice for BIPOC communities.
Desmond Williams is a community healer and TRE practitioner, stand-up comedian and writer whose work is grounded in the culture, music, dancing, laughter and storytelling of his upbringing as a member of the Nlaka’Pamux First Nations and Afro-Vincentian communities. Desmond’s work explores healing practices for communities affected by white supremacy and colonialism, and how to foster the care and support needed to explore these depths safely and effectively with others.
Emerald and Desmond have collaborated to create an artistic and healing space which serves their communities. Their emerging social enterprise, Sari-Sari Mi Nah Sari, invites all to support healing racial divides through a retail and community space—a platform where local BIPOC artists, creators, chefs, other BIPOC-owned businesses and their offerings are showcased, and where healing for BIPOC community by BIPOC healers and practitioners is celebrated and elevated in every exchange.
Andrea Wheeler
Andrea Wheeler is a seventh-generation settler, farmer and community organizer who is exploring and facilitating a collaborative practice of decolonial land stewardship and community engagement as a form of landback. As the first woman in her family to inherit land acquired through colonial violence and dispossession, she is navigating her own positionality through research and relationship building in territories of the Kanyen'keh:ka (Mohawk), Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples (where she currently lives). Andrea's project presentation will consider different forms of decolonized reparations, as they unfold through relationships made between land and people, trusting in the guidance of nature and friendship in support of intergenerational community and healing.
Moderator
Vanessa Richards
Instructor, Community Capacity Building Certificate
Vanessa Richards is an interdisciplinary artist and engagement facilitator combining a passion for communities and culture into unique socially-engaged projects. She applies what she’s learning about collaboration through music and performance, to developing work that uplifts the art of city building and people power.
As an advisor, one of her pleasures is to advance imaginative thinking across disciplines with organizations like RADIUS at SFU, Ethọ́s Lab (S.T.E.A.M. for Black youth) and Solid State youth cooperative. She holds an MPhil from Cardiff University, Wales, and is an Associate of the SFU Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue and a producer/facilitator for the Social Venture Institute with Hollyhock Leadership Institute.
Welcome: The People and The Land
Yvonne Rigsby Jones
Class Elder, Community Capacity Building Certificate
Yvonne is Snuneymuxw First Nation, Coast Salish. She leads the Community Capacity Building program as Elder.
Yvonne dedicated 29 years to leading Tsow-Tun Le Lum Treatment Centre, retiring in June 2015. Over her career she developed treatment practices such as Residential School Trauma Healing, while participating in regional and national committees. She is an ambassador for Reconciliation Canada and a member of the Governing Council for the MSW Indigenous Trauma and Resiliency Program at the University of Toronto.
Yvonne understands traditional practices and ceremony are the way home for many of our wounded people. She has listened, encouraged, challenged and led. She believes in compassion because compassion works.
Recap of Equity in Practice: Community Capacity Building
Emerald Asuncion and Desmond Williams
Emerald Asuncion and Desmond Williams are two friends working to build a new healing space and cultural hub in Chinatown for Vancouver's racialized communities.
The multipurpose space, called Sari-Sari Mi Nah Sari, will bring together a collective of healers who work in everything from reiki and meditation to space for intergenerational sharing circles and trauma-informed healing practices. The collective will also include a retail shop inviting all to support local artists, craftspeople and small businesses, and serve as a rental space for cultural activities such as music, dance, comedy and poetry.
“If we create a space that is run by and employs only people of colour, and offers food and art from people of colour,” says Desmond, “we will create a space that feels inviting and safe for people of colour to gather and access the healing they need without cultural barriers.”
Andrea Wheeler
In the midst of the pandemic, Andrea Wheeler moved from the west coast (unceded W̱SÁNEĆ territory) to the southern Ontario farmland she had inherited after her father's passing. The farm is located on the unceded territory of the Kanyen’keh:ka (Mohawk), Huron-Wendat and Haudenosaunee peoples. “My generational land wealth came from stolen land,” she acknowledges.
In reflecting on what legacy and land ownership mean on stolen land, she realized she could use her privilege as a landowner to share resources and support reconciliation and anti-racism.
Under the umbrella term of “reparations collective,” Andrea has initiated several projects on her farm in collaboration with her new community, including a street help group, an artist/activist residency, and growing food with Indigenous communities and new immigrants.
“We’re collaborating to make the farm a place for the people that we support to come be with the land, a place where we can share knowledge and bring healing,” says Andrea.
Jshandeep Jassal
Growing up in North Delta and Surrey, Jshandeep Jassal recalls feeling frustrated by negative stereotypes and narratives she faced as a South Asian youth.
As co-director of the non-profit Solid State Community Industries, Jshandeep already works with racialized youth, but she is now launching a new effort: the SAH peer support network for South Asian youth. SAH stands for South Asian Healing, but sah also means “breathe” in Punjabi.
“The name speaks to the whole idea of creating a safe space for South Asian youth to just breathe and be able to talk about issues facing our community,” says Jshandeep. “We want to change our cultural mindset on what healing is. Rather than looking at mental health as seeing something wrong with a person, we want people to see that a person is actually strong because they’re taking control of their wellbeing. It’s a cultural shift.”
- Learn more about Jshandeep
- South Asian Healing (SAH) Network on Instagram: @sahnetwork
- Email: info.sahnetwork@gmail.com
- Join the SAH contact list and be invited to meetings
- Learn more about Solid State Community Industries
Mateo Tobar
Mateo Tobar is a young social innovator who dreams of empowering Ecuador's youth to create a better future. For the past year, he has been developing a project called Youth Education Lab (YEL).
“I dream about an Ecuador where every youth has access to meaningful learning, to experiential learning opportunities through social innovation or social entrepreneurship,” he says. “I want to empower youth to realize they have the capacity to transform their ideas into visible projects.”
Mateo’s pilot program for YEL involves working with youths in three specific communities and providing them with a capacity building process based on their individual needs. He hopes to be able to provide funding for the youths’ projects to bolster their professional profiles and help them access university or scholarship opportunities.
- Learn more about Mateo
- Learn more about the Youth Education Lab
- Email: mateo.tobar@youtheducationlab.com
- Phone: (+593) 982525226
- LinkedIn: @MateoTobarTamayo
Jónína Kirton
Jónína Kirton is a poet and a builder of bridges. Of mixed Icelandic and Métis ancestry, the award-winning author works to connect other Indigenous and racialized writers to the literary community, a sometimes-elitist world where non-white writers can struggle to feel at home.
Jónína works with the Indigenous Editors Association, which provides a supportive network for Indigenous editors and publishing professionals. She also serves as “BIPOC Auntie” for the Writer’s Studio program at SFU, supporting and guiding students who are people of colour.
“For writers who are new, especially if we come from a marginalized community, it’s difficult,” explains Jónína. “What we need is people who have similar experiences as us to edit our work, to mentor us, to help us make our way in this world. It’s not the same for a white writer who has privilege, education, money. When they enter a room, it’s a very different experience for them than it is for us.”
At the event, Jónína shared a newly written poem.
"It came to me as a gift from my niece," she said. "She's 17, and she's Métis, like me. She sent me this Virginia Woolf quote, but she added to it: 'I am rooted, but I flow, and I grow.' I thought that was really lovely. I have grown so much in this program, and this poem really has a lot to do with the wonderful learning here."
rooted
for my niece Gabby
I am rooted, but I flow. – Virginia Woolf, Waves
I am a story within the stories of many
I am a paradox
one thing and then another
parts of a whole
that does not know itself
turning towards the invisible
I can see the limits of knowledge
the places where formulas dissolve
into knowing that can only come
when quiet and walking in a forest
where the standing ones watch and wait
for us to return to ourselves
to the new stories that are waiting to unfold
Community Capacity Building Class Agreements
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Hope in Resistance: Stories of Climate Justice
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Mapping Equity: Using GIS and Maps to Make Invisible Realities Visible
Maps are great tools to bring together a massive amount of data and share it in a format everyone is familiar with. They are also a unique tool to bring unnoticeable realities—including realities of inequality—to visible patterns. This 90-minute workshop will introduce you to how to make a thematic map that highlights an equity indicator.
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Equity in Practice: More Stories of Community Capacity Building
SFU’s Community Capacity Building Certificate supports learners as they engage community by sharing lived experiences and adopting new tools for building projects and movements. Learners deepen their relationships with themselves, their communities and the land to create a project and move forward a change they’d like to see in the world.
Read More →
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Should a Just Recovery Include a Basic Income for B.C.?
At this event we will look at the recommendations and analysis of the Final Report of the British Columbia Expert Panel on Basic Income to ask: should a just recovery for all include a basic income?
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Overcoming Digital Divides: Youth and Digital Skills
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Equity in Practice: Community Capacity Building
Join us to hear inspiring stories from the most recent cohort of SFU’s Community Capacity Building Certificate learners and their growth as emerging leaders working towards equity in their communities.
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Overcoming Digital Divides: Public Internet Access
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Researching for Climate Justice
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Overcoming Digital Divides: People with Disabilities and Accessibility
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Rosemary Brown Memorial Symposium
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Overcoming Digital Divides: Older Adults and Digital Literacy
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The 2021 Spry Memorial Lecture
Desmond Cole and Tanya Talaga, along with moderator Candis Callison, will consider recent attention over the escalation of commentary on the representation of Indigenous, Black, and people of colour; the structural challenges that currently impede calls for greater diversity; and how institutions and platforms can foster a more constructive dialogue.
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Dean's Lecture on Information + Society
We are pleased to partner with SFU Library to invite you to the Dean's Lecture on Information + Society: an evening of conversation with Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.
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Decolonizing Scottish Studies
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Innovations in Research
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Overcoming Digital Divides: Low-Income Communities
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Zooming In: Education in 2021
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Overcoming Digital Divides: Indigenous, Rural and Remote Communities
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