Equity Hub
Equity Hub
CapaCITY/É’s overarching goal is to catalyze the implementation of sustainable transportation interventions to support health, mobility, and equity in cities. Our research aims to understand the key implementation factors for scaling up and scaling out these interventions across different jurisdictions to support health, equity, and sustainability goals.
Many population groups have been historically marginalized from access to power, resources, and rights that shape their city, and these inequities persist, in transportation and other domains of city life. Across CapaCITY/É we define equity-deserving populations as communities that face structural challenges towards equitable access and resources when it comes to safe, sustainable, and just transportation.
To ensure sustainable transportation interventions accelerate progress towards equity, implementation science in this realm must have an explicit focus on equity. This requires placing deliberate and sustained emphasis on the cultures, histories, and needs of communities, conducting critical analysis of current systems and structures that perpetuate inequities, along with generating robust data that reflect the experiences and needs of equity-deserving populations.
Our approach
Beyond a research focus on equity, we see equity as a daily practice within our team. This daily practice centres inclusion, and cultural safety for everyone with CapaCITY/É and for those who work with us both as individuals and as a team. Our Equity Hub, comprising team members with diverse expertise and lived experiences, plays a crucial role in guiding this work and ensuring equity remains at the forefront of our initiatives. The Equity Hub’s approach is structured around three key areas, as depicted in the illustration below: how we work, how we design and conduct research, and what topics we choose to study and how we report them.
The questions that the Equity hub addresses include, but are not limited to:
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How do we create a connected and informed team environment?
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How do we create equitable hiring processes?
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How do we ensure that the well-being of our team is prioritized?
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How do we ensure consistency and transparency in our research process?
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How do we ensure that the relevance of our research is regularly communicated?
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How do we apply diverse research methods when engaging with equity-deserving groups?
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How do we engage equity-deserving groups in a meaningful and respectful manner?
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How do our research outcomes resonate with our interest holders?
For a detailed look at Equity Hub’s activities and achievements over the past year, we invite you to read our ‘One Year Update’ blog post. If you have any questions regarding this work, please get in touch with us via our contact form.
Equity Hub Members
Aman Chandi (she/her) joined the Equity Hub to support the creation of a workplace where people’s well-being is prioritized. Her work in the Hub is inspired by the writings and teachings of adrienne maree brown, especially their book “Loving Corrections.”
Audrey Giles (she/her) comes to the Equity Hub with a desire to amplify the knowledge that people are experts on their own lives and thus must be included in decision-making processes. Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed has inspired her.
Ignacio Tiznado-Aitken (he/him) joined the Equity Hub to learn from its members and further his pursuit of advancing transport equity in both procedural and distributional dimensions. He enjoys exploring philosophical frameworks and their relevance to transportation, drawing inspiration from Karel Martens’ Transport Justice to Ingrid Robeyns’ work on limitarianism.
Jacob Alhassan (he/him) is an Assistant Professor in Community Health and Epidemiology, College of Medicine, University of Saskatchewan. He joined the equity hub to support work in transport equity and to learn from hub members. He intellectually draws from scholars on decolonization such as Franz Fanon & Kwame Nkrumah, structural violence scholars such as Johan Galtun & Paul Farmer and critical race theorists such as Kimberlé Crenshaw.
Karen Laberee (she/her) considers herself fortunate to have lived in or worked with communities across Canada. With over a decade of experience managing community-engaged research projects, she is inspired by those individuals who tirelessly work to build healthy, connected communities.
Meghan Winters (she/her) joined the Equity Hub as she wanted to have space and a community to reflect on how equity is being taken up across CapaCITY/E’s activities, and learn about how we can do this deeper or better. She’s inspired and energized by the people – as researchers, planners, activists, or in their daily lives – taking steps to change how things have been done, in both incremental and transformational ways. Right now on her mind is thinking about different levels of system change (inspired by this image from Diane Finegood’s Complex Systems project https://www.sfu.ca/complex-systems-frameworks/about/the-project.html), and where our work can have impact.
Tiffany Muller-Myrdahl (she/her) is University Lecturer in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and Urban Studies at SFU. She is passionate about understanding and applying the tools and strategies activists, planners, and academics have used to make cities more equitable in their function and design. She especially loves authors – like Ruha Benjamin, JK Gibson-Graham, Eve Sedgwick – who remind us how fundamental imagination is for social change.
Sarah Moore (she/her)