Anishnaabe Soccer player, Victoria Marchand, among panel coming in BIPOC Athlete Experience

With the Tokyo Olympics around the corner and a trending topic right now, Support Network for Indigenous Women & Women of Colour – SNIWOC, will be bringing Olympians to the table to discuss the connection between race, culture and sports on Thursday, July 8 at 9pm-10:30pm.

Knowing how well sport has connected people like nothing else, by empowering and elevating communities, the experience will recognize that it also gives voice to the invisible, underserved and underrepresented. In Canada, many BIPOC individuals do not see themselves among sports leaders that the media supports most. The under-representation in the Canadian sports media affects the op-portunities presented to BIPOC youth athletes.

The Town Hall panel featuring prominent athletes Victoria Marchand, Pamphinette Buisa and Charity Williams will come this Thursday.

Victoria Marchand is a proud Anishinaabekwe from Kitigan Zibi and Long Point First Nations. As a proud community member, she helps organize grassroots initia-tives, such as the Anishinabe Moose Moratorium and supports the Black grassroots organizations in Ottawa. Today, you can find Victoria training for the 2021 World Indigenous Games as the Captain of the National Indigenous Women’s Soccer Team as well as a former uOttawa Gee-Gee training for the FISU American Games in Mexico, 2022.

Pamphinette Buisa has been living on Lekwungen Territories, also known as Victoria BC, to pursue her Olympic dreams and is a member of the National Senior Women’s Rugby 7’s team. Pamphinette is constantly sharing and bringing awareness about the social justice needed in this world including but not limited to racial justice, safe and inclusive sport for all bodies, harm reduction for people who use substances and is an advocate for people who live in shelters or are unhoused here in Victoria.

Charity Williams is a Jamaican, Canadian activist, community leader, and Olympian. Charity is the youth engagement coordinator for the BC Black History Awareness Society, where she is opening up safe and empowering spaces where BIPOC can feel seen and heard. As well as facilitating decolonizing and anti-Black/Indigenous racism workshops, Charity heads the BIPOC Working Group for her team Rugby Canada, where she is helping create policy changes and an equitable, safe, and diverse sport environment. She is also the athlete representative for the Team Canada Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Alliance.

Only with open and meaningful conversation can the awareness in the sport community and level the playing field for all Canadians be created. Closed captioning is available for this conversation.

The event link can be followed here: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81714357520, or online at SNIWOC.

It has been acknowledged that this event is hosted from the traditional territory of the Lekwungen people, currently and specifically the Esquimalt and Songhees Na-tions.

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