Transforming Perspective – 2024 – 2025

Program Overview

Transforming Perspectives is an innovative initiative that utilizes creative practices in anti-racism education as a catalyst for dialogue, deep learning, and collective systems transformation. By grounding its educational methodology in lived experiences and artistic expression, the initiative reframes conventional anti-racism training to center the voices, multi-layered stories, and everyday realities of the global majority. Through this approach, the initiative cultivates a participatory, relational, and experiential ecosystem that strengthens both individual and organizational capacities to engage in meaningful structural change.  

Scoping Statement & Strategic Alignment

This initiative acts as a vital bridge between CFRAC’s research and its training and education frameworks, moving the organization away from transactional and checklist training formats toward a living, community-rooted learning ecosystem. Transforming Perspectives builds directly upon foundational insights from the Anti-Racism Action Program (ARAP)—an earlier project focused on building culturally rooted and creative approaches in Anti-Racist education. By seamlessly aligning community-based research with artistic engagement, the project operationalizes CFRAC’s commitment to equity, dignity, and systems of change. This work allows CFRAC to continue updating our training and education content that is responsive to current literature, centered on the voices of the community, and utilizes art to engage in system transformation. 

Why This Approach Matters to CFRAC: Traditional training models frequently emphasize brief individual awareness, risk being performative, or place disproportionate emotional labor on racialized participants. By employing arts-based and narrative practices, CFRAC bypasses institutional power dynamics and engages directly with the deep mental models, beliefs, and systemic structures to execute anti-racism work that translates directly into sustained structural application.  

Key Activities

Over the duration of the initiative, the project team worked on the following activities to increase the awareness of racism and its impacts at the interpersonal, institutional and systemic level: 

• Foundational Research & Curated Literature: CFRAC developed a Transformative Reading List encompassing cross-geographical narratives in fiction to position storytelling as a method of learning, reflection and growth. This list included several questions to support organizations and individuals to dig deeper and reflect on their own Anti-Racism journey. In addition, CFRAC highlighted a variety of different thinkers in Anti-Racism such as Aloha Aina, Patrice Lumumba, Dr. Angela Davis and Gayatri Spivak on our social media. These two resources are also incorporated as addition training resources for organizations to access to invites the public to reflect on the complex intersections of identity, colonialism, power and collective resilience. 

• Low-Barrier Community Storytelling Spaces: Through local outreach initiatives (including community interviews at the 124 Street / Terwillegar Night Market), the program gathered audio reflections from community members regarding home, identity, and migration, turning lived experiences directly into active educational components.   
  • One example included a local self-published author that read from his collection of books that caught the attention of staff at Island Brew Cafe where they were invited to the Cafe’s upcoming open mic night.  

• Immersive Artist Roundtables & Creative Commissions: CFRAC engaged local multi-disciplinary artists to produce commissioned works—spanning poetry and abstract visual art —and facilitated reflective dialogues analyzing how the creative process can model system transformation outside of colonial and institutional structures. The three art pieces are: 
  • The Threads of Us by Damilare Bakare  
  • My Relatives, You Belong by Natal Rivas Bolaños 
  • We Watch as the World Opens by Timiro Mohamed  

• Multimodal Curriculum & Content Development: Translating research and dialogue into action, CFRAC is updating its curriculum materials and frameworks to ensure training remains audience-responsive, adaptive, balanced in theory and data, and explicit in addressing root causes. This includes incorporating the various works created as part of this project into training resources.   

Learnings from the Project

The implementation of Transforming Perspectives yielded the following organizational and community insights:  

• Home and Identity are Multidimensional: Lived experiences of home are deeply non-linear, cultural, and psychological. Participants navigate complex, “in-between” spaces and hybrid identities. Consequently, anti-racism spaces must allow full human complexity—grief, joy, and contradiction—to be present without forcing individuals to justify or prove their experiences.  

• Art as a Tool for Systems Change and “Teleportation”: Roundtable sessions revealed that art acts as a unique container for impossible systemic questions. It allows participants to conceptualize and temporarily “teleport” into Horizon 3 (a fully liberatory future and new system), experiencing equitable dynamics immediately and untethering from rigid, current institutional norms.  

• Process Precedes Product: Genuine cultural and systemic transformation demands a commitment to patience, slow relational accountability, and vulnerability, mirroring the tactile, collaborative processes found in artistic creation.  

• Trauma-Informed Mitigation: Arts-based approaches function as highly inclusive entry points that enable deep emotional access and critical self-reflection without requiring marginalized individuals to verbally relive personal or systemic trauma.  

Further Exploration

As CFRAC continues this initiative, the focus will be on the following ways to achieve CFRAC’s strategic goals: 

• Developing Adaptive, Multi-Pathway Curriculums: Building distinct learning pathways based on participants’ varied lived experiences, shifting from generic frameworks to highly context-specific, action-oriented anti-racist tools.  

• Integrate Art Based Practices: Recognizing the important ways that art is foundational to system transformation work, CFRAC will continue to find ways to engage artists in future projects. This will include incorporating different art-based approaches in training and education.  

• Implement Learnings in other CFRAC Programs: Aside from CFRAC’s training and education, there are also several other programs where staff are able to incorporate these learnings such as the HR in the Grey (funded by Women and Gender Equality), which is a collaboration between several organizations that are focused on redesigning the workplace environment by creating equitable HR policies and leadership pathways for BIPOC women and gender diverse individuals at the intersection of disability.  

Relationships

This project was funded by the City of Edmonton Anti-Racism Grant.