This large project aims at understanding how intersections of race, gender and violence as experienced by African Canadians contribute to ill-health and social disparities are not currently responded to by existing health and social services. 

Arts-based participatory methods are used to amplify the voice of racialized community members and meaningfully involve them as co-researchers and storyteller facilitators in the development of anti-racist and anti-colonial workshops tailored for health and social service students and professionals. 

This project works from an understanding that structural inequities are dynamic and complex and thus require research and action that is anti-oppressive and reflective.   Therefore, we employ a pedagogical process that pursues social justice and systemic change.

Four overarching goals of the proposed project include:

1. Participatory action research and Africentric Canons and values will guide multimedia storytelling work. Multimedia representations of “previously unattended experiences” of silence about race, racism, and gender-based violence when seeking health and social services will be intergenerational, diverse and shared by ANS people. 

2. Through skills training, storytellers will be trained how to incorporate their stories into the facilitation and design of Interprofessional Health Education (IPHE) modules for health and social service students and anti-racist, compassion-building workshops for practicing health and social service professionals. 

3. From the facilitated workshops, nurture a collective consciousness that will inform a shared action plan to enact social and/or policy change intended to contribute to the dismantling systemic realities that perpetuate and maintain experiences of racism and gender-based violence for ANS people. 

4. Disseminate knowledge that will include the development of a toolkit to create anti-racist IPHE modules and a workshop facilitation guide that link racism and gender-based violence to health and social systems. Results will be shared in conference presentations, open-access reports, film, and peer-reviewed journal articles.

We are in the preliminary stages of this community and art-based project.