Updates

With details of our 5-year anniversary celebration event to come, let’s take a sneak peek of the upcoming season.

Since September 2022, we’ve held 42 events and workshops, released 33 episodes, and engaged more than 25,000 podcast listeners. During that time, working diligently behind the scenes—editing podcast audio, and supporting communications and events programming—was our interim Programs Assistant Samantha Walters, who we are pleased to announce has now moved into a continuing role in the office.

On June 29, 2023, 200 people turned out for the world premiere screening of Smokey Devil: Underworld Street Reporter, a feature length documentary by Nathaniel Canuel, co-hosted by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement.

Released every spring, Voices of the Street (VOTS) is a compendium of writing by Megaphone community members, a space for exploration of creative expression through language.

We are delighted to welcome Julia Aoki as Program Manager at SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement!

The 2023 Spring season has already kicked off with four episodes that explore varying topics from racial justice, community building, colonialism, and regional storytelling.

In Below the Radar’s The Climate Imaginary series we touched on disinformation, links between the arts and climate activism, and the challenges in making real environmental change.

SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement was honoured to support four events at the Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival, featuring activists, performance artists, and a comic journalist, telling their stories and illuminating directions for positive change.

A podcast that maps accessible, sustainable and equitable transportation in urban spaces.

SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement (SFU VOCE) and Megaphone are delighted to present the completed Voices of the Street podcast — a Below the Radar original series created by Megaphone storytellers. Inspired by writings and themes from the 2021 Voices of the Street literary anthology, this series was thoughtfully curated and hosted by Megaphone Speakers Bureau participants: Jules Chapman, Angel Gates, Nicolas Leech-Crier and Yvonne Mark.

We are delighted to welcome our newest co-op student Alex Masse, who has been diligently working behind the scenes with us at SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement (SFU VOCE) since January.

As we step into 2022 with anticipation for the new engagement opportunities this year will bring, we are excited to introduce Steve Tornes, who has recently stepped into the role of interim Community Engagement Coordinator for SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement.

Women, Work, More is a Below the Radar series highlighting the experiences of women across varying life-stages and social intersections.

In our latest series on the Below the Radar podcast, we chatted with five leaders of the climate justice movement: Khelsilem, Anjali Appadurai, Eugene Kung, Marc Lee, and Grand Chief Stewart Phillip. They each talked about their personal experiences as activists and how we can work towards mitigating climate change and addressing systemic inequality.

Alyha is a fourth year sociology and labour studies student with a deep interest in capitalist critiques, social movements, climate, and human rights. During her co-op placement, Alyha has been creating engaging communications materials, assisting with the upcoming launch of our new website, and curating her own mini series for the Below the Radar podcast.

As The Power of Disability podcast series comes to a close, we are looking back on the series, recounting its beginnings, and encapsulating the insights of each guest. Host Al Etmanski spoke with six guests with disabilities who have been key forces of change — in arts, activism, policy change, and many other sites of social transformation and innovation.

For emerging researchers, the process of publishing in an academic journal is “a bit of black box,” says SFU Geography professor and Minor Revisions host Eugene McCann. SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement got a chance to speak with McCann about his experience hosting Minor Revisions, the intentions driving the podcast, and how he hopes these conversations will make the publishing process more approachable.

Tonya Surman, a social entrepreneur who has built multiple world-changing projects which put people and the planet first, was invited to speak at the sixth annual Jim Green Memorial Lecture on Wednesday, March 7th at the SFU Goldcorp Centre fort the Arts. For the past six years, SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement has supported and organized the annual Jim Green Memorial Lecture with the help of various partners. This year’s event was co-sponsored by SFU Public Square, SFU RADIUS, and LEDlab.

The COVID-19 pandemic has not only been devastating to our communities, it has laid bare so many of the inequities that have been ongoing within our institutions and communities.

Whose city is it anyway? Who does it embrace, who does it marginalize, and who does it push away from legibility? Whose bodies matter and whose don’t? Is the ‘Right to the City’ just words on a page?

Jackie Obungah, our office’s Summer 2020 Co-op Communications Specialist, guest hosted an episode of Below the Radar featuring a conversation with Aida Mwanzia.

Black Youth Organizers on Mutual Aid and Community Responses to COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed most aspects of life. Here at SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement, we continue to explore some of these changes.

From everyone here at SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement, we’d like to celebrate Indigenous History Month. We want to highlight some of the Indigenous thinkers, academics, and artists we’ve had the opportunity to work with this year through both our podcast Below the Radar and our public programming.

What can COVID-19 teach us about health inequities that are present in our society? Our latest installment of Below the Radar Pandemic Conversations explores the current situation of COVID-19 and what previous pandemics can teach us about what is happening globally. Am Johal sits down with Meaghan Thumath, a clinical scientist at the Centre for Gender and Sexual Health Equity and clinical associate professor at UBC’s School of Nursing.

What is it like to work on the front lines of a major pandemic? On our latest Below the Radar Pandemic Conversations episode, we meet Dr. Kevin Patterson, an ICU physician who works in critical care in Nanaimo. Dr. Patterson is also a writer and novelist.

What impact will COVID-19 have on geopolitics and climate change? That is the question that Paul Rogers answers on the latest installment of Below the Radar Conversations.

Our office is excited to partner with Yarrow Intergenerational Society for Justice on the launch of Speak My Language, a project that features 5 radio documentaries created by teams of youth and Chinese seniors.

At the 5th annual One Book One SFU event, authors Esi Edugyan and Omar El Akkad sat down to discuss Edugyan’s newest novel Washington Black. This year’s event took place on January 30th in the Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema at the Goldcorp Centre for the Arts. In partnership with SFU Library and Pulpfiction Books, our office was proud to facilitate this conversation between these two renowned authors.

Our live recording with UBC professor and author Glen Coulthard is now available! Click here to listen to the episode in full. Read below for more information on this special episode of our podcast Below the Radar.

Visual artist and photographer Anne Marie Slater shared her recent 2019 Artist Residency with the Victoria Square Project {Artist Rick Lowe (USA) Documenta 14 in collaboration with Artist, Maria Papadimitriou (GR)} in Athens, Greece in a workshop at SFU Woodward’s entitled Intersections, Athens. The workshop highlighted the place based context of social practice that considers people and context.

We are partnering again with Reel Causes for their upcoming event #Indigeneity, which will showcase Indigenous films that address pressing contemporary Indigenous issues here in Canada and around the world.

On a grey Vancouver day, the community engagement team met with co-facilitators Jackie Wong and Stefania Seccia for Pie Happy Hour at Acme Cafe to talk about one of the Office’s longest-running programs, Community Journalism 101.

In partnership with the Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival, social activist and community organizer Kenny Bailey conducted a workshop on how we can imagine creative ways of solving social problems — presenting the Social Emergency Response Center as one of those solutions.

On November 14th, 2017 Itrath Syed, a PhD Candidate at the School of Communications at SFU gave a lecture on Gendered Islamophobia and Muslim Women’s Resistance. Following the talk, Itrath was in conversation with Samaah Jaffer of SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement.

This Thursday, we’re excited to be hosting SFU Geography professor Geoff Mann who will be speaking about his new book In the Long Run, We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy and Revolution — a groundbreaking debunking of moderate attempts to resolve financial crises. As a preview to the book launch, we had the opportunity to ask Mann about some of the themes of the book and his stand out title.

Super Cool Tuesdays has been connecting artists and members of the DTES as a drop-in speaker series for over five years. With over 50 artists involved to date and a weekly attendance ranging from 10-25 community members (most of them regulars), folks meet up to discuss, learn about, and make art.

Former UN rapporteur Miloon Kothari visited Vancouver this summer to receive an honorary doctorate from Simon Fraser University. This trip marked his return to Vancouver for the first time since visiting as UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing 10 years ago to report on Vancouver’s housing situation.

Award-winning graphic journalist Joe Sacco was at SFU on November 2, 2016, for an engaging evening in conversation with Chris Brayshaw from Pulp Fiction Books, filmmaker Sobhi Al-Zobaidi, Broken Pencil editor Alison Lang, and Roxanne Panchasi from SFU’s History Department.

Libby Davies comes to SFU Woodward’s this Wednesday, Sept 21 for Libby Davies: Reflections of a Life in Politics. The former MP will be in conversation with Am Johal and Jackie wong as they delve into her four decades of experience in politics.

Join us as we commemorate 22 years of rebuilding and progress since the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. On June 28, 2016, SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement, Embrace Rwanda, and Building Bridges with Rwanda present Remembering Rwanda: 22 Years Later.

On the first four Wednesdays of March, SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement, SFU’s Indigenous Research Institute, and SFU’s Office for Aboriginal Peoples co-presented a speaker series on Aboriginal issues, featuring engaging lectures and panel discussions. The entire series was filmed and can be accessed through our online video gallery.

On Thursday March, 17, the Design Studio for Social Intervention (DS4SI) hosted a workshop on social emergencies — the different forms they take, how they may be identified, and how to productivity respond with a social intervention.

The conversation acknowledged that we are at a pivotal moment in Canadian history, and recognized the opportunity to find a new way forward, together. All community members were invited to join in this national movement towards reconciliation for Indigenous peoples and all Canadians.

Human trafficking and human rights violations of migrant workers in the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) states of the Middle East is a growing concern. In parts of the Gulf, migrant workers make up over 90 per cent of the population. On Tuesday January 31, SFU alumna Laya Behbahani will discuss how the abuse of migrant workers in the Gulf constitutes human trafficking, and how the issue needs to be examined with the intention of prevention.

Super Cool Tuesdays wrapped up for the Fall a few weeks ago. We were lucky to have welcomed a great selection of artists during this past session, and to have partnered with community organizations such as Heart of the City Festival (HOTC) and Hives for Humanities.