The Office of the Dean of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging invite staff and faculty to join us on Thursday, March 28 for the workshop, Creating Safer Spaces for Trans & Non-Binary Students.
This informative workshop facilitated by Challenge Accepted will focus on creating safer spaces for trans and non-binary students in educational settings. It will be an opportunity for you to discover strategies and gain practical tools and insights to foster inclusivity, combat discrimination, and promote equity, respect, and belonging for trans and non-binary individuals. Let's work together to create a campus where everyone can thrive.
Workshop Facilitators
Sookie Bardwell (she/her/hers, they/them/theirs) is passionately committed to the work of helping people be better together. She is a white settler invested in the work of decolonization and racial justice. She is also a fat, queer, genderqueer femme living with invisible disability. Her work is informed by all of these ways in which she moves through the world.
Sookie is an OCT certified teacher, has been certified as a sex and relational health educator through Opt BC, and holds a MA in Gender Studies and Feminist Research from McMaster University. She has been involved in social change/justice work for almost twenty years, and has extensive experience as an educator, trainer, and facilitator- with a focus on LGBTQ+ equity and inclusion, Body Liberation, emotional competency, relational skills, and sexual health. She believes everyone deserves to be treated like a person, and that everyone deserves access to- and has the capacity to develop- the knowledge and skills needed to encounter difference with compassion, kindness and genuine curiosity.
Alyx Duffy (they/them/theirs) has over a decade’s experience in equity and inclusion work across the country, with a strong focus on 2SLGBTQI safer schools and communities. They are a genderqueer, white-presenting, settler, equity educator based in Tkaronto. They work to educate and inspire, encouraging everyone to consider how to make community safer and more inclusive for each and every complex and dynamic individual.
With extensive experience working with educational organizations, Alyx has built a wide range of tools for design and delivering professional development curricula to audiences of all ages, including work with over a dozen school boards and post-secondary institutions in Ontario.
About Challenge Accepted
At Challenge Accepted, we offer equity and inclusion consulting in multiple sectors and communities, including developing and delivering curriculum in all levels of education, the healthcare sector, and within frontline, community-serving organizations. As a collective founded and operated by queer and trans folks, all of us at Challenge Accepted are deeply interested and involved in the work of building organizational capacity for queer and trans inclusion in Toronto and beyond.
In our education work we ask the hard questions and route them through experiential learning, with the aim of connecting the learner’s own assumptions and values to deeply embedded systemic issues. We present real-world examples that encourage the application of knowledge, and generate confidence in the belief that real, meaningful changes are possible. We see this work as connecting to our ongoing engagements supporting organizations across sectors in building their understanding and capacity to integrate intersectional 2SLGBTQI equity and inclusion practices in all aspects of their work.
For more information or questions please connect with kimberly.daniels@humber.ca.
