Black Women’s Program at BWSS was formed to redress the deeply entrenched systemic and institutional barriers faced by Black women, highlighting the experiences that are too often moved to the margins of discourse, service, policy, and advocacy.
Through her community-based organizing, frontline work, and activism over three decades, Angela Marie MacDougall has been deeply involved in social justice movements.
Since the nineties, Angela has developed training curricula from an intersectional and anti-oppression framework. Angela’s impact includes developing empowerment and advocacy-based programming and service delivery models that address gender-based violence and violence against women. This includes feminist trauma-informed analysis that integrates the role of substance use and mental wellness.
Angela is a founding member of Intersectional Feminist Justice Research: an organizing Collaborative that brings together researchers, academics, data and policy analysts, students, and community organizers to provide critical research, data, policy, and strategic support for ending violence, gender equity, and social justice movements.
Listen to Angela's hopes for Black Vancouver
Recording scribe
Canada has not reached gender and racial equity as an examination of the lives of Black women and girls and gender diverse people reveals. People of African descent have lived in Canada for centuries, today 1.2 million people in Canada self report as Black, including 620,000 women and girls, in particular continue to live in poverty and poor health, experience significant levels of violence and struggle to access decent employment, public housing and public services. Violence against Black women and girls, and gender diverse peoples is largely rendered invisible in Canada. In the era of “Me Too” where Black women and girls, and gender diverse peoples are still struggling to have society recognize the ways gender based violence disproportionately affects them. I feel the weight of the responsibility to support and build a pan-Canadian awareness and response that addresses gender-based violence in the lives of Black women and girls, and gender diverse peoples. And to make visible the experience of Black women and girls, and gender diverse peoples in policy and program, provincially, federally, and here in Vancouver.