Honoring the Leadership of Black Women in Alberta — Dunia Nur

Honoring the Leadership of Black Women in Alberta

Dunia Nur

unia Nur is a wom-

Dan of African descent residing in Treaty 6 territory known as Edmonto, Alberta. She is the president of the African Canadian Civic Engagement Council (ACCEC), a national public affairs that protects and promotes people of African Descent’s dignity and human rights. Their work is intersectional and of a wide variety – at the heart of which lies the empowerment and development of people of African descent.

ACCEC’s work as a grassroots organization meant that they carried on without support from governmental institutions for years. Their work was made possible thanks to the ongoing grassroots community support that supported

ACCEC through social capital. Typically, the demographic that comes to ACCEC for support is community members who identify as

African, Caribbean, and black, predominantly consisting of youths and women. Individuals come to ACCEC when they face challenges in navigating immigration, family, and criminal justice systems. ACCEC’S unique focus is on care models and intervention, emphasizing a cultural and intersectional lens.

ACCEC court work program is recognized nationally, and people of African Descent, lawyers, social workers, mental health practitioners across the province reach out for ACCEC services which include advocacy, community reintegration, rehabilitation, an opportunity for employment, housing and a 24-hour support line for women and children fleeing violence. ACCEC’s court support program provides the following: bail plans, impact race and cultural assessment reports, assistance with pre-removal risk assessment from a cultural lens, support with family reunification by ensuring Black children apprehended are placed in kinship care that accommodates their developmental growth and cultural safety, ACCEC has a close relationship with the victim services department, ACCEC works closely with women targeted in the criminal justice system.

LCCMedia spent some time with Dunia Nur recently.

“We’ve been providing grassroots community court work programs, and we sustained it through community support and social capital. From there on, we went to do advocacy, and we collected data. There was the need to promote and protect people of African descent rights and dignity while also celebrating our history, and who we are as people; hence this became our mandate and purpose of existence.”

Although Nur feels like they still have a long way to go, she has been doing this work for the past decade, and the only difference is society is finally catching up to the experience and realities of people of African Descent and in particular the experience of anti-black racism and the intersectional layers.

In supporting and protecting the Black community, we intentionally celebrate our peoples’ significant contributions to society and worldwide in general. Nur states that all of ACCEC’s programs are designed from empowerment for all African descent people, particularly AfricanDiaspora youth, by bringing to their attention their ancestral lineage, heritage, and culture and how they have contributed to their contributions to the cultural and economic fabric of the Canadian society.

Nur emphasized the significance of the embodiment of pre-colonial cul-

Dunia Nur is the cofounder of ACCEC

tural values. “To be successful and impactful in grassroots community-based services support, we need to embody the same cultural values that we speak of and tap into the diverse cultures and healing modalities that have been lost due to colonization, enslavement and displacement. We also need to look at statistics because data tells a story. The story we are reading in data now is that we come from communities over-represented in the justice system, discriminated against in the healthcare system, and underrepresented in community organizations. We came from communities where women of African descent are dying faster regarding domestic violence, structural violence, health and inequities. Nur’s organization is advocating and leading in disaggregated research data. They have pioneered during the pandemic of COVID -19, bridging special attention on how the virus disproportionately affects people of African descent, which caught national attention and contributed to some policy discussion and implementations.

Nur states that their goal is to create awareness around anti-Black racism, anti-African racism and gender-based violence. Once the understanding has been completed, we approach problem-solving through an intersectional lens, and a community grassroots participatory approach”.

Nur locates herself in practice sharing what motivates her work as she states, “ I am everything the system targets as I am a Muslim woman, of African descent from an immigrant family. Who continues to be a target of violence the purpose of mentioning this is the program of implementation that we employ are the same tools that have kept me safe.

My work and legacy explicitly show the young African diaspora how to be their own agent of change from a place of strength instead of a place of deficiency and disparity. ACCEC supports people that are made vulnerable by systematic racism.

To find more, please visit: www.accec.ca

Nur’s goal is to create awareness around anti-Black racism, anti-African racism and gender-based violence.