Laura is grateful to live and learn on the traditional territories of the Musqueam and Coast Salish Peoples.

Motivated by a passion for justice and meaningful scholarship conducted with integrity leading to action, Laura is an advocate, public scholar, teacher and mentor, occupational therapist (OT), servant leader, dedicated volunteer, and activist. Her doctoral work is focused on enhancing understanding, promoting diversity, and upholding human dignity. As a public scholar she pursues collaborations that will benefit the academic and wider community.

Laura serves on and chairs numerous committees, she has co-founded national networks, and engages in mentoring and teaching. In all this, Laura hopes to be known for her willingness to serve others through humble leadership. She is knowledgeable and constantly learning, compassionate, assertive and sincere. Her doctoral work will equip her with skills, training, and networks necessary to inform and advocate for social/policy change.

She hopes to continue into a career that will involve making recommendations to policymakers, participating in initiatives designed to combat stigmatization, and continuing to facilitate research that will contribute to positive change in Canada and beyond. Although her goals may seem grand, Laura demonstrates the tenacity and leadership needed to reach them.

Jacky WL Chan is an outdoor educator and the co-founder and director of Zen’s Outdoor Leadership Camp for Youth (ZOLCY) – a volunteer driven Canadian NGO. ZOLCY’s mission is to cultivate self-development, outdoor leadership, and the pursuit of continuous education. Jacky leads groups to Jamaica and Nepal where he facilitates volunteer-driven service learning programs grounded in critical social justice initiatives.

Jacky has trained in martial arts for over twenty years and spent several months in China where he trained with the legendary Shaolin Warrior monks. He currently holds the title of “Sensei” as a third degree black belt in the art of Shotokan karate-do. He has studied yoga and meditation in India and Nepal and is a certified Laughter Yoga instructor.

Jacky is an avid traveler and has explored many regions of the world in pursuit of adventure, knowledge, and cultural understanding. In 2014/15 he cruised down the Amazon River in a cargo boat, trained in Chinese kickboxing in China, and motorcycled across Nepal and Northern India.

Jacky has a bachelor of education and a bachelor of outdoor recreation from Lakehead University and is currently working on his Med with a focus on social justice.

Fluent in Spanish, English and Hindi, Naina is soon starting her Masters in Financial Economics. She brings leadership skills from managing a women empowerment Enactus project for Saint Mary’s in South America, which provided customized business training to impoverished artisan mothers and improved the lives of their young children. With her journalistic interests, Naina answered parenting queries for an Indian national magazine and completed a prestigious 6-week immersion fellowship at CBC Radio-Canada. With her teaching skills, she has tutored many poor, disabled children in India and taught 60+ lectures on various statistics and economics topics to Canadian MBA and undergraduate students. With her analytical and writing skills, she has published eight academic papers, even winning the Best Student Research Paper award at the Higher Education Advances Conference in Spain for her work on exam reliability. She continues to investigate the reliability of multiple-choice exam scores and exam length in higher education. With her finance skills, she is researching the risks of credit and equity markets of 200+ countries. Deeply committed to the cause of disadvantaged kids, Naina will use the 3M award to bring to life her social enterprise project, Our Superheroes, to address child illiteracy and labour issues in developing nations.

Erin Hayward is Kanien’keha:ka, turtle clan, born and raised in Scarborough Ontario. Her family is traditionally from Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, Germany, Ireland, and Britain. She is a ceremonial helper, hand drummer, and youth mentor.

In addition to many roles that Erin currently holds, she is the youth director of the Nogojiwanong Friendship Centre (NFC), the Chair of the NFC youth council, the graduate student representative of the Trent University Native Association, a senior program facilitator for the Trent University Aboriginal Cultural Knowledge and Science Youth Program, and a member of the Peterborough youth constituency council.

Erin believes that by bridging the gap between the academic post-secondary community and the general community surrounding post-secondary institutions, a traditional indigenous framework of a healthy community can be achieved. She believes all youth need to be surrounded by the gifts of children, adults, and elders/seniors for healing addictions, substance abuse, and mental health issues on campuses across the country.

Erin is completing her M.Sc in Environmental and Life Sciences through Trent University. Through her community based research project in two Anishinaabek communities, she hopes to identify if ozonation pre-treatment will decrease adverse impacts on Freshwater mussel species living downstream of wastewater treatment facilities.

Bai Bintou B Kaira was born in Gambia, however considers herself to be a global citizen. Bintou strongly believes the power of education, and therefore serves as an advocate to create educational opportunities for minority students interested in engineering, science and mathematics. Bintou’s passion for education and leadership serves as motivation to be involved in many initiatives at Dalhousie, including Imhotep’s Legacy Academy, a university-community partnership geared to increase representation of minority students in STEM. Bintou extensively volunteers in activities and organizations that yield growth and development, as illustrated through her work on the executive and as president of the Dalhousie African Student Association. In March 2017, Bintou was one of five recipients of the prestigious Dalhousie 2017 Governor’s award, which is given to the most influential student leaders in the university.

Bintou believes in togetherness, she lives by the fact that nothing is impossible when people come together as one. Bintou is always up to something on campus; either volunteering, mentoring, tutoring, fundraising or advertising events. Post-graduation, Bintou plans to pursue medicine or a medical related research.

Outside of academics, Bintou enjoys family time, traveling, cooking, reading and most of all listening to TED talks.

Aakriti is an aspiring educator and researcher committed to evidence-based research that solves twenty-first century problems. For the last four years, she has been working at the university’s Advanced Learning Technologies Lab to create mindJig, an educational software that teaches students how to think critically and understand competing perspectives. Aakriti’s work on mindJig and critical thinking has been recognized internationally and is receiving funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). She believes critical thinking is key to teaching students how to evaluate the vast amounts of information they come across in today’s globalized, digital worlds. More importantly, critical thinking allows students to better understand existing social inequities and become leaders that enable marginalized voices to be better represented. Aakriti firmly believes leadership is a form of education in its own right. With this philosophy in mind, she helped develop a Departmental Students Association for students in her undergraduate program and the Emerging Voices Creative Writers Conference, the first free citywide conference for young adults that is now an annual event. Currently, Aakriti is pursuing graduate studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and is involved with a variety of other education technology projects.

Sarah grew up on the northwest coast of British Columbia, where she noticed a detached and dispassionate style of healthcare delivery negatively impacting her neighbours and family members. Since leaving her hometown to attend university, she has aspired to become a family physician to one day practice medicine in remote areas of Canada. In particular, she looks to provide quality and continuous long-term healthcare options to marginalized communities.

As an undergraduate at the University of Victoria, Sarah has initiated and supported several community initiatives. For example, she co-created a youth-kitchen program at the Quadra-Village Community Centre in Victoria, B.C., providing local high school students with foundational workplace and cooking skills allowing them to find employment in the food and tourism industry. More recently, Sarah developed her own volunteer position at Tall Tree Integrated Health Centre in Victoria, B.C., working with physical and occupational therapists to better understand personalized and preventative healthcare methods and how to treat others in a more holistic way. As her undergraduate career comes to a close, the volunteer position she has created will provide future students with the opportunity for hands-on shadowing experience in the healthcare field.

Anika Riopel is an energetic and enthusiastic jack-of-all-trades: environmental educator, cook, actor and a certified Scuba diving and cycling instructor! After failing out of theatre school when she was 18, Anika regrouped herself by pursuing an eclectic variety passions and experiences through work, volunteering and travel. During this journey, Anika discovered a deep passion for ocean stewardship through Scuba Diving. A life changing internship with Connect Ocean, an ocean-based NGO, set her on a path toward environmental education through place-based and experiential learning. In 2014, she returned to post-secondary education to pursue a double major with Honours in Environment, Society & Sustainability and Theatre Arts at Dalhousie University. Anika believes that creating experiences can lead to powerful change and help make meaningful connections across barriers. In 2015, she led the Wave of Waste Project, a massive art installation that brought public awareness to marine waste. Anika is currently working on Jump In a project that aims to build swimming infrastructure on the downtown waterfront to change the public’s perception of the water quality. She also loves a good cup of tea, to warm up from the sea!

Graduating from a B.A. Human Rights and Law, Caitlin’s passion for human rights has led her to pursue opportunities with the Canadian Parliament, civil society organizations and children with special needs. She has taken on campus leadership roles with six separate clubs, including founding the Human Rights Society and being elected President of the Oxfam at Carleton. As Carleton’s Fulbright Killam Fellow, Caitlin studied at American University in Washington D.C. while interning at the Canadian Embassy and CAIR Coalition.

A dedicated intersectional feminist, Caitlin coordinated and attended an Oxfam Canada Learning Event on gender-based violence in Benin in October 2016, and has since been asked to sit on Oxfam’s 2016-2019 Board of Directors Policy Committee. She has emerged as a campus leader in combatting sexual violence by mobilizing thousands of students to reform Carleton’s Sexual Violence Policy. This summer, she will be leading a team of >100 volunteers to create a national framework response to the sexual violence crisis on Canadian University and College campuses.

Caitlin’s future goals include attending law school and becoming a judge. Above all, she hopes to continue empowering marginalized groups to access their rights and to ensure that they can live a life with dignity.

Jory is a passionate emerging scholar and community leader from the University of British Columbia. As a teen, Jory co-founded Canada’s first character education movement, which now involves more than 12,000 students in British Columbia. An engaging speaker, Jory has shared her vision of educational leadership and refugee relief at the Character Canada Conference, the Red Cross Humanitarians in Training Conference, and at several Canadian universities. Jory finished in the top 1% of her class as a first generation student, while simultaneously shaping the social climate of the campus and beyond. Her greatest joy is to challenge social norms by addressing diverse perspectives thoughtfully and effectively in search of the common good. A visionary and innovator, Jory is the co-founder and President of AMS Refugee Relief at UBC. This organization gathers peers, faculty, and community members to fundraise towards the private sponsorship of refugees, including a family of ten Syrians who have arrived in Vancouver. A Governor General’s Bronze medalist, Rhodes scholarship finalist in British Columbia, and two-time recipient of UBC’s prestigious Premier and Undergraduate and Wesbrook Scholarship, Jory’s desire to use her energy and talents to serve the community has directed her scholarly attention towards global governance and diplomacy.