Health Equity Action Lab
The RADIUS Health Equity Action Lab aims to centre health-equity while fostering the creation and incubation of equity-based models, ventures, partnerships, and interventions by those from communities disproportionally impacted by health inequities.
Through our current Lab program, Reimagine Health — we support individuals and ventures at their various stages of exploration, ideation, and action, through cohort-based, equity-centred learning and mentorship.
Reimagine Health Program
The offering is currently on pause.
The Reimagine Health program team held a reflections session to capture their thoughts and learnings after three years of running the program supporting 62 participants and their initiatives.
Some of us are mothers, sisters, aunties, some of us are holding elders. Our lives are so complex and we have to give space to that and not just talk about the work, because there's a person behind the work.
Alia Sunderji
At Reimagine Health, we are making the connections between individual health, collective health and collective liberation, and focusing on psychology praxis that is connected to liberation psychology rooted in Indigenous ways of knowing.
Halah Zumrawi
We encourage people — our participants, our advisors to show up as their whole selves. When I go into rooms, I start with Who do I come from? Where do I come from?
Ilhan Abdullahi
Questions?
If you still have questions about Health Equity Action Lab, email Ilhan Abdullahi at iabdullahi@radiussfu.com.
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Alia Sunderji
Equity-Centred Accelerator Consultant and Entrepreneur-in-Residence Mentor
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Alia is a social entrepreneur and lecturer at SFU, teaching Sustainable Innovation and Introduction to Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Passionate about the fields of sustainability, poverty alleviation, and impact investing, Alia is the Founder of Luv The Grub, an emerging social enterprise that operates at a number of levels in the food system by capturing produce seconds that would otherwise go to waste. Alia hires newcomer refugees and immigrants through a paid employment training program and produces delicious chutneys and spreads for the local market. In addition, Alia is the Co-Founder of Liv & Lola, a fair trade home decor business that works with artisans in rural areas of Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Thailand where employment opportunities are scarce in an effort to lift them, their families and their communities out of poverty.
Ilhan Abdullahi
Program Manager
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Ilhan is a Somali-Canadian whose parents’ migration journey brought her to these unceded Coast Salish Lands at a very young age. Stemming from her family’s experience of being racialized newcomers, Ilhan has been passionate in addressing social and health inequities and developed a commitment to social justice. Having spent some time in community activism, youth work and health promotion in the Lower Mainlands of Vancouver, Ilhan then moved to Toronto to pursue her Masters in Public Health and gain a critical intersectional analysis on what promotes vulnerability to health inequities. She has recently returned to BC and is ecstatic to get involved in health equity and community work. When she’s not working, you can find her embarking on solo travels somewhere in the world.
Definitions
What we mean when we say
Health Equity: What we are working towards by addressing the unfair and avoidable health differences shaped by the social determinants of health that are deeply rooted in systems and institutions.
Social Determinants of Health: The conditions in which we live in that contribute to one’s vulnerability to preventable chronic diseases and health challenges.
Intersectionality: A term first coined by Kimberlee Crenshaw- we apply this concept in our work to achieve health equity by centring the lived experiences of impacted communities to understand the health differences among communities and how it’s influenced by the interconnectedness of social identities.
Lab: A collaborative space for focused learning discovery and action, focused on systemic change.
CURRENT FUNDERS & PARTNERS
Making the Health Equity Action Lab possible
Thank you to our funders who have made the Health Promotion Lab possible over the years: Health Sciences Association of British Columbia, RBC Future Launch, Public Health Agency of Canada, and Definity Insurance Foundation.
