Ripple: A Cultural Leadership Lab for the Next Wave of Creative Changemakers

This year-long intensive gives emerging equity-deserving creative changemakers paid, hands-on, and mentor-supported opportunities to cultivate the skills needed to design and deliver responsive and transformative youth-focused media arts programming and re-imagine leadership and governance within arts organizations and the cultural sector.

Among the Mentors

(Additional Mentors To Be Added Soon)

Writer/Convener/Community Organizer

Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal(she/her) is a critical race feminist, writer, former lawyer, educator and facilitator who grew up on the traditional, present and future territories of the Semiahmoo, Katzie, Kwikwetlem, Kwantlen, Qayqayt, Tsawwassen and Musqueam First Nations (also known as Surrey and North Delta, British Columbia). With over 15 years of facilitation and teaching experience, Preeti is committed to arts-based methodologies as a source of personal and collective empowerment, transformation and community-building. She has taught creative writing at Guelph-Humber College, led arts-based workshops across Canada and the US in various institutions (including universities, law faculties, women’s spaces and youth centers), and firmly believes that stories change the world by altering our ways of seeing, feeling and being with one another.

Non-profit Organizational Development and Governance
 
Dorla Tune is an independent Organizational Development Consultant and founder of Dorla Tune Consulting, with deep experience in nonprofit leadership, community engagement, and systems-level planning. Dorla brings a social‑justice lens grounded in lived experience backed by nearly two decades working across immigrant serving, gender-based violence, child welfare, philanthropic, and community development organizations.
 
Working exclusively with non-profits and foundations, Dorla’s insights and understanding of this complex sector deepen with each project. She builds inclusive, values-aligned processes that prioritize the dignity, voice, and leadership of participants, especially those from racialized communities. Her approach centers relational equity: creating safe, reflective spaces for diverse stakeholders to contribute authentically and to help shape meaningful strategies together. 
Angela Ma Brown

Anti Oppression Educator and Facilitation Trainer

Angela (she/her/hers) is a first-generation Chinese occupier on the unceded, stolen, shared and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), sḵwx̱wú7mesh  Úxwumixw (Squamish) and səlil̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil Waututh) First Nations. As an educator, she aims to centre Indigenous knowledge and decolonize her practices and pedagogy.Angela is passionate about supporting school communities in fostering students’ social and emotional health and development. Through the lenses of creativity, compassion, critical thinking and trauma and culturally responsive teaching, Angela facilitates, consults, coaches and collaborates with community organizations and schools to address racism and oppression and to support equitable, inclusive and anti-racist practices and policies.Angela has been teaching for 24 years in the public school system. She held a district consultant position in Anti-racism and Diversity for 7 years and was seconded to SFU as a Faculty Associate to mentor student teachers in the Indigenous Perspectives Teacher Education Module for 3 years. She is currently a District Mentor supporting Early Career Teachers. Angela holds an undergraduate degree in Cultural Anthropology from UBC and a Master’s degree in Diversity in Curriculum and Instruction from SFU.

Artist/Facilitator/Curator

Ruby Singh is a multi award winning performer, composer and producer residing on the unceded territories of  the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ/Selilwitulh Nations (Vancouver BC.). His creativity crosses the boundaries of music, poetry, photography and film engaging with mythos, memory, justice and fantasy. Singh is an artist whose work is informed by sound found all around us, from the whirling planets and stars of distant galaxies to percussion of an umbrella under coastal rains, to the perpetual moving birdsong of the dawn chorus, constantly circling the globe. The richly imaginative visual textures to his sound design have found kinship in the theatre, film and dance worlds, where he has been celebrated by multiple Jessie and Leo award nominations. His distinct approach uses traditional and emergent sonic practices to create compositions that express the vast spectrum of the human experience. In 2022 Singh received the Lieutenant Governor’s Jubilee Award for excellence in Art and Music. In 2023 he received his inaugural Juno nomination and he won both the WCMA award for best Global Music Artist of the Year and BC Touring Council’s  Artist of the Year. Singh believes in art’s ability to reimagine futures, to repurpose aesthetic freedoms toward civil and environmental justice.

Non Profit Management/Art-based Youth and Community Engagement

Deblekha Guin was mostly raised in Six Nations territory (Southern Ontario), and has been an uninvited settler on the unsurrendered territories of the Penelakut, Lamulchi, and other Hul’quim’in’um speaking Nations for the past 27 years. Shortly after arriving on what is colonially known as ‘Galiano Island’, Guin got swept up by a merry band of creative misfits determined to start a film school in the woods. After a few years with the Gulf Islands Film and Television School (GIFTS),  and just before completing her MA in Communications from SFU, Deblekha founded the Access to Media Education Society (AMES).  Since the birth of AMES, she’s been instrumental in designing, coordinating and overseeing a multitude of participatory media arts initiatives, and related school-based outreach programs. In May 2020 Guin was recognized for her extensive work with BIPOC-centred creative communities when she was granted an “Intercultural Trust Award” at BC’s Anti-Racism Awards Ceremony.

Governance, Communications/Curriculuum Development

I am veteran writer and communicator with nine years of experience in both corporate and non-profit environments. Currently project-managing curriculum design and educational partnerships, I have previously been a teaching assistant, and also a workshop facilitator and instructor with a focus on media studies. Additionally, I am a print, podcast and video journalist that has been published nationally in Briarpatch, and internationally in the Sunday Guardian, as well as elsewhere.

Applications are now closed.

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