Community care, healing and wellness resources

Centering the voices of folx identifying as Black, Indigenous, and/or People of Colour

The purpose of this resource set is to provide a non-exhaustive and regularly updated series of resources centering the voices of folx who identify as Black, Indigenous and/or a Person of Colour.

Often times, following an incident of discrimination, individuals are left to deal with and manage feelings of hurt and trauma while perpetrators, often in a best case scenario, apologize. This hurt needs to be adequately validated and healing needs to be supported.

One of the many ways to support this healing is to centre community voices and know you are not alone in your experience. There is great strength in community, and in learning and leaning on each other, so even though you may feel alone in your experience, hopefully through these social media accounts, posts, articles, videos, podcasts, and more, you can find community. Take care of yourself, because your existence and successes are forms of resistance, and they would not be possible without rest.

Please use these resources with care, and reach out to those around you, and/or trained mental health personnel if you feel you need to.

Author of statements/design of document: Manvi Bhalla

Content contributors: Manvi Bhalla, Christine Williams, Isabella Romano

Resources to use to reduce translation exhaustion

Translation exhaustion, as defined by Indigenous scholar Dr. Twyla Baker, is, “the idea that Indigenous people (or any marginalized person/group) engaging with the larger population on a given subject or topic related to bias, must first set the stage in terms of historical context all the way to current state of affairs, before even addressing said topic of bias - over and over again - due to the lack of education/background the listener has. A direct impact of erasure of true Indigenous history beyond the cursory mention in our school systems."

If you are experiencing a situation where you feel exhausted explaining why certain communications or actions might be discriminatory, feel free to use and consult the following (non-exhaustive) list of resources and pass them along to the individual(s) who can benefit from this information.

NOTE: Not all are written by BIPOC-identifying individuals, but we’ve tried our best. However, each category, at minimum, does have resources informed by lived experiences.

This list is non-exhaustive, and was created by fellow University of Waterloo students.

We welcome feedback to make changes to this resource set to aid in better aligning it with its purpose as a resource for BIPOC-identifying individuals (not allies).

There are a plethora of lists available for allies outside of this set (although many of the links under the translation exhaustion section are helpful for allies).