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Nathalie Lozano Neira

My community organizing efforts began when I arrived in Coast Salish territories as a refugee at age 14 after being displaced from the town I grew up in Colombia. I joined a leadership program for migrant youth that gave me a sense of purpose and made me feel useful again, the program encouraged us to use what we learned to leverage it to support other immigrant and refugee youth just arriving. One of the challenges was finding my voice as a young woman within the group and being able to talk about feminism and how policies were affecting women directly. I delved deep in in migrant justice efforts, bringing awareness to my community around immigration policy, and organizing youth to co-create arts and media projects that would set the ground for our communities to have important conversations around migration.

As part of a group of activist youth, we launched a research project to hear first-hand from refugee youth in schools to capture their experiences of oppression within the school system. We then took those findings to guide us in the creation of policy recommendations that we were able to share with municipal and provincial governments. It was during one of our presentations about the school recognizing the multiple languages many of us spoke as credit towards graduation, at the same event, an Indigenous elder was talking about her experience with residential schools and the systematic policies that led her to know her mother’s language. It was an important moment for us, for myself, to take time to hear, to learn and to understand the connections between my activist efforts around migrant justice and Indigenous sovereignty.

From then onwards, I understood that any social justice struggle had to be grounded on Indigenous and Black sovereignty. Although I had grown up with Indigenous youth activists, in wasn’t until 2017, when I felt ready to act in solidarity, that I began to collaborate with Butterflies in Spirit, a dance group consisting of family members of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG), who performed at an international women’s peace theatre festival and met with women Indigenous and Afro-Colombian groups in Nasa territory of Cauca, Colombia. In this exchange, Butterflies in Spirit spook about the context of residential schools in Canada. Colombian participants spoke of the civil conflict, which is in large part financed by resource extraction, often from Canadian institutions. These exchanges served as a bridge and connector so that Indigenous and Afro-Colombian women could find in each other allies and so that the struggle didn’t feel so isolating.

In 2018 and 2019, I travelled with the Butterflies to Chiapas to meet with various women collectives and to support their performance at the Zapatista International Women’s gathering. Interpreting the Butterflies’ story to the comandantas has been the honour of my life and has fueled a continued desire to de-center whiteness from conversations about race and to focus on solidarity across colonial borders.

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Zarqa Yaftali

Zarqa Yaftali is a peacebuilder and an advocate for women’s rights, protection, and participation in Afghanistan.

Since 2007, she has served as Executive Director of the Women and Children Legal Research Foundation (WCLRF), where she has conducted legal and field research in Afghanistan on the topic of violence and discrimination against women and girls; access to education; as well as human rights mechanisms, justice, and property rights.

In October 2020, on the occasion of the 20th-anniversary of UNSCR 1325, she was selected to represent civil society and brief at the UN Security Council Open Debate on Women, Peace and Security. She also briefed the UNSC about protecting the participation of women peace makers on 19 January 2021. She was also recognized for her tireless advocacy as the recipient of UNDP’s prestigious 2019 N-Peace Award, which highlights the contributions of peacebuilders toward implementation of the WPS agenda.

Yaftali was member of the civil society delegation in London and Geneva conferences on the Afghanistan peace process, and was a member of the High Council for National Reconciliation. She is also a member of various national civil society organizations and advocacy groups, including the Secretariat of the Civil Society Joint Working Group, board member of Women Living under Muslim Laws WLUML, Champion of girl’s education in Afghanistan, Co-Chair of the WPS Working Group, and board member of the Women Regional Network.