Equity in Practice: More Stories of Community Capacity Building
Equity + Justice, 2021, Summit Towards Equity
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 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.
In June, we heard powerful, transformative stories from some of the learners in the most recent cohort of the certificate. Now, as the spring cohorts have come to a close, several more of these learners will share what they’ve been working on.
Join them as they reflect on their growth throughout the program as emerging leaders working towards equity in their communities.
12:00 p.m. (PT)
Online Event
Closed captioning in English will be available at this 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 will take place online throughout the year and will bring the university into conversation with local and global communities. Join us to learn and take action together towards a more just, equitable and sustainable future.
On this Page
Sarah Common
Sarah Common is a community support worker, beekeeper, and executive director and co-founder of Hives for Humanity. She is passionate about fostering vibrant, healthy community through empowerment of living experience, in connection to the land and with reciprocity in relationship. Sarah’s presentation will highlight the Garden of Care initiative, a proposed Community Land Trust at Hastings Folk Garden in the Downtown Eastside. This vision includes resisting development and the holding of land as a community-governed green space, through work of inclusion, love and dignity, honouring all ways of knowing and being.
Maria dela Cruz
Maria dela Cruz (siya/she/they) is a Systems Change Community Developer with Collingwood Neighbourhood House; a trauma informed decolonizing anti-oppression certified executive coach and facilitator; a peacemaking circle practitioner; and a founding member of the Fierce Filipinx Femmes Ancestral Circle (FFFAC), on the unceded sacred ancestral territories of the Səlí̓lwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and xwməθkwəyə̓ m (Musqueam) First Nations. Maria is the Vice President of the board of directors of WAVAW as well as her co-operative housing board. She also provides sliding scale or pro bono coaching and leadership empowerment to women, femmes and youth in transition.
Romila Barryman
Romila Barryman is a death doula, facilitator and cybermystic of kejawen and Zoroastrian ancestry who works with liminality: the breath between sentences, the space between words, souls in transition—whether between this life and the next, relationships or identities. Romila's presentation will introduce jiwa, a grief collective exploring the interconnectedness of loss by connecting future ancestors back into the wisdom and care of their hyperlocal communities and each other. As the world looks to “return to normal,” jiwa looks instead to return to complex, non-linear, cosmically expansive realities by creating a space to process positionality through grief.
Lystra Sam
Lystra Sam is an entrepreneur, actor, writer, traveller, longtime Blacktivist and disruptor of harmful systems, whose work facilitates connection, healing and joy. As a dreamweaver, wanderer, storyteller, mentor and mentee, Lystra is the founder of QmooniTi, a travel community that embraces culture and travel from a decolonized lens; The World When Black workshop series; a Patreon in support of folks who want to learn how to practice being an ally; alongside justice and healing work with organizations who recognize that anti-racism is a lifelong journey. Lystra’s presentation will introduce her most recent project, Sisters Leading Sisters, which invites BIPOC women to rest, dream and rise in transformative gatherings which facilitate healing, connection and reimagining.
Fawziah Bhatia & Vicki Wang
Fawziah Bhatia is a community builder, motivational speaker and lifelong learner. She is a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) with the International Coach Federation and a Certified Organizational Coach (COC). Fawziah’s ethic of service is deeply rooted in her faith as an Ismaili Muslim, and grounded in relationships built on mutual respect. Fawziah hopes to bring about connection, growth, possibility and agency in her role as a coach in the community.
Vicki Wang is a dynamic community leader who loves food, learning and friendship. Vicki’s work supports peers at Kudoz, a platform for people to find meaningful connections with fellow humans. Vicki creates opportunities for those in her community and currently leads a team of moderators and supports them in facilitating group experiences. Vicki is an inspiration and a valuable co-producer in the launch of Curiko.
Fawziah and Vicki are collaborating on the launch of Curiko—a community of people with and without disabilities. Here, you can connect with your fellow humans. Add what you love. Discover new things about yourself, others, and the world around you. Help build a world where we all matter and belong. Curiko builds on the strong foundation created by the Kudoz community over the last seven years, which celebrates reflection, growth and transformative learning.
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.
Event Recording
Community Capacity Building program cohort present equity-focused projects — Yelin Gemma Lee, The Peak (November 19, 2021)
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Read More →
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