Who We Are
Race and Disability Canada is an innovative initiative dedicated to exploring and tackling the intersections of race and disability.
Our Values
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We actively challenge colonial systems and ways of knowing by centering Indigenous, Black, and racialized people with disabilities (IBRpD), and by co-creating knowledge with communities rather than imposing external frameworks. Our work resists cultural imperialism and values knowledge systems that colonial hierarchies have historically devalued.
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We centre the leadership, voices, and priorities of people with disabilities, especially those from Indigenous, Black, and racialized communities. Our programs dismantle ableist structures and foster collective access, care, and liberation.
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We design every aspect of our work—from facilitation to research to partnerships—to disrupt systemic oppression and to build more equitable relationships across lines of race, ability, gender, and other identities.
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We adapt learning environments and processes to honour participants’ diverse lived experiences, identities, and ways of knowing, rather than enforcing one-size-fits-all approaches. We continually listen and adjust to community feedback.
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We prioritize projects where the community takes a leadership role in defining the issues, driving the inquiry, and shaping the outcomes. Our role is to support and amplify communities.
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We engage in research processes where IBRpD community members co-lead the work, from defining the research questions to analyzing data and sharing knowledge, ensuring that the work serves community goals.
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We collaborate with communities as equal partners in generating knowledge that leads to practical action and social change. Research is done with and by communities, not on them.
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We commit to research approaches that challenge ableism and work toward the liberation of people with disabilities. IBRpD community members direct the research and its applications.
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We recognize that people's experiences of oppression and privilege are shaped by multiple, intersecting identities (race, disability, gender, class, etc.). We design all our work to address these complex realities, not single-issue approaches.
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We create platforms, opportunities, and spaces where Indigenous, Black, and racialized people with disabilities can lead conversations, share their knowledge, and drive systemic change. Our role is to amplify the lived realities of IBRpD.
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We embed anti-racist and anti-ableist analysis and practice into all aspects of our work, from organizational leadership culture to partnerships to curriculum, actively working to dismantle white supremacy and advance racial justice. We examine and challenge ableist assumptions in how we teach, research, organize, and collaborate. We co-create practices of access and collective care that go beyond compliance to foster true belonging.
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We intentionally value Indigenous, Black, and other marginalized ways of knowing, rejecting colonial hierarchies of knowledge. Our work honours oral histories, lived experience, cultural practices, and other forms of knowing alongside academic knowledge.
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We validate and uplift knowledge that has historically been devalued by colonial systems—such as embodied knowledge, community wisdom, and relational knowledge—and centre these in both our pedagogy and research.
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We design learning and research processes that value lived experience, cultural knowledge, and emotional/relational knowledge as equally important to formal academic knowledge.
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We draw on Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed to design learning experiences that centre IBRpD voices, foster critical consciousness, and support collective action toward liberation. Our pedagogy honours diverse knowledge and aims to transform both individuals and society.
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We actively reject dominant cultural norms that impose Eurocentric, ableist, and colonial standards. Instead, we foster spaces where diverse cultural practices, values, and knowledge systems are respected and centred.
How do we embed accessibility and intersectionality?
Race and Disability Canada was founded on the shoulders of racialized people with disabilities who did groundbreaking advocacy on the intersection of race and disability. As an organization we are, by definition, grounded in an intersectional framework.
Accessibility and intersectionality are embedded into our work; they are not add-ons, but integral to our entire educational and training approach. This is reflected in every aspect of our work, from leadership to program design to facilitation, and in our intentional commitment to building a team that represents a range of social locations and lived experiences.
Our approach ensures that inclusion is not theoretical, but practiced and reflected in both our internal culture and external impact.
