RIPPLE
Mentorship Program for Emerging Cultural Leaders
Ripple is a hands-on governance and leadership training program that provides emerging creative changemakers from equity deserving communities the opportunity to be mentored by seasoned arts administrators, arts practitioners, organizational consultants and anti-oppression educators.
This project is explicitly ABOUT creating mentorship and wrap around support opportunities that will build skills and enhance the capacities of young people so that they can go on to assume leadership roles within AMES, and more broadly in the arts and cultural sectors in BC and beyond.
Why Ripple?
We are investing in the skills of the next generation of equity-deserving cultural leaders, and providing them with real-world opportunities reimagine the future of AMES and expand the ripple effect we can have with the cultural ecosystem. The current cohort is actively transforming the organization by determining AMES strategic directions and priorities.
Our Focus Areas
Governance, Strategy & Succession
Cohort members are developing strategic and succession planning skills while helping develop a long-term vision for the future of AMES that incorporates the dreams and desires of the next generation. Reimagining our governance practices to more deeply center equity and accountability, and ensure that youth have supported pathways to leadership has been identified as a key goal.
Programs: Workshops & Events
Discussions about programming directions have been rooted in the goal of expanding the base of people who are participating in AMES’ programs while meeting the evolving needs and priorities expressed by youth from the communities we serve. Inspired by these ideas and discussions, we are in the early stages of designing short and medium-format programs that foster optimism, resilience, and agency, build media literacy and critical thinking and help propel grassroots action and movement building.
Funding, Operations & Communications
The cohort expressed a strong interest in seeing AMES expand our visibility and network of partners, collaborators, participants, and supporters. Partnering with youth-led grassroots organizations was identified as a key aspect of rejuvenating our collaborative ecosystem. Refining and refreshing AMES’ messaging and digital presence was highlighted as an essential way of engaging more youth and enhancing their understanding of AMES programs, values and impacts. Early work on these fronts is underway.
Youth Advisors
Khushi is a creative organizer and youth leader who loves bringing people together through art, storytelling, and hands-on community projects. Originally from New Delhi and now based in Vancouver, she has spent the last several years working across arts, culture, and sustainability always with a focus on collaboration and care.
Alongside her work in the creative sector, Khushi leads DreamStill Technologies, a youth-driven initiative that diverts clothing from landfills and encourages more circular fashion practices. Through events, campaigns, and education, she’s helping make sustainability more accessible and community-rooted.
Khushi is energized by building relationships, supporting emerging changemakers, and dreaming up better systems with others.
Marcelo Ponce (he/she) is a young neurodivergent trans and queer person from Iztacalco mexico city living in Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam territories since 2012.
He’s an unprofessional artist and professional hater (arts worker) renowned for saying things people don’t want to hear, but should. Her work includes consultation, program development, resource creation, and training on gender diversity and disability justice in the healthcare and arts and culture sectors.
Ryah King is a multidisciplinary creative from the Caribbean with a deep love for design, sustainability and colour. She uses media and storytelling as tools for connection, self-expression, and social change.
For inspiration, her main source is the vibrant atmosphere of the lived experiences she had growing up in the lesser Antilles. Impacting others through art and animation that is grounded in equity, community care is a deeply important part of her practice, as well as amplifying voices that are often underrepresented or unheard.
Jeremiah Brooks is a 19 year-old Liberian Canadian and a 3x JrBAA Award recipient in Community Engagement, Social Justice, and Fine Arts and the current JrBAA Youth Council President. He has over two years of experience empowering youth and developing communities, from helping start the first Black student union in Surrey, BC, to founding Black Kings Collective as the Executive Director. Having worked as a Youth Outreach & Engagement through Ethos Lab, he is now serving as the National Youth Coordinator Assistant for the Liberian Association of Canada.
He holds a fierce determination, passion, and responsibility in fostering socio-economic development in the Black Community whether it’s through tackling gender based injustices or promoting sustainable economics. As a first year architecture student at BCIT and a BIDC Design Cypher student with a passion in Afrofuturism and African Urbanism, he serves to craft collective development in designing a free and decolonized future, breaking the bounds of colonial archetypes in community, interpersonal relations, and design.
Purity (any/all) is a passionate artist. He volunteers with local social justice advocacy organizations by creating art and helping build strong community networks.
Beyond their creative practice, they are deeply interested in how technology – the application of knowledge, process and material – can interact with community, way of life and environment in an interdependent manner. She is particularly engaged with issues of food equity, extractive systems, and the alternative systems that challenge and resist such exploitatio
Mentors
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.
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.
Community Agreements
THESE WERE CO-DEVELOPED BY THE YOUTH ADVISORY COMMITTEE AND THE YOUTH LEADERSHIP LAB TO GUIDE THE WORK WE ARE ENGAGED IN TOGETHER
Acknowledge, respond to, and learn from diverse needs, perspectives and lived experiences
Create collaborative, caring, and supportive spaces that facilitate collective growth
Remain grounded in our shared values of decolonization and intergenerational responsibility
Foster an encouraging atmosphere that inspires curiosity and momentum
Watch this space for the Ripple Resources Portal where we’ll share lessons learned, promising practices, templates and resources we’ve drawn from and forged along the way!
Work with us:
Are you interested in developing and contributing ideas?
Do you have knowledge you would like to share?
Do you have skills you are looking to acquire?
Supported By
Heart felt gratitude from AMES to ‘The Multiculturalism and Anti-Racism Initiatives Program’ of Canadian Heritage for supporting the Ripple program.
