Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Committee (EDI)

Current Members

First Row: Ala Refai, Ivneet Gill, Kristi Kwan, Aliya Leacock, Faiza Ali, Rosemary Martino, Tijana Simic. Second Row: Trish Watts, Madi Silverthorne, Sewit Tewelde,  Rupinder Sran,  Sunny Kim and Jaspal Brar. Bottom Row:

Renee Boney and Shenelle D’Silva

Who We Are

We are a group of SLPs and former graduates of the UofT SLP program along with current student representatives and faculty advisors Dr. Rosemary Martino and Dr. Tijana Simic.

Purpose

We are committed to interacting and working with all underrepresented/minoritized populations (including BIPOC groups, LGBTQ2S people, racialized groups, people with disabilities, those from rural or remote communities, and more) in order to advance all forms of equity, and in particular, health equity.

When the Black Lives Matter movement gained prominence in the spring of 2021, we began having discussions about race, diversity, and inclusion within our profession. We recognized that the diversity of our clientele did not match the clinicians working with them. Unfortunately, neither the CASLPO nor SAC annual reports for 2019 had listed demographic information of members in Ontario and Canada, though anecdotally we’ve found that there is a similar underrepresentation. In light of this we have created a committee to address these concerns. What started as a monthly meeting in the workplace has expanded to the UofT SLP Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Committee.

We meet on a monthly basis and our goal is to gather information and perspectives from SLP students and alumni to further inform future direction and initiatives within the UofT SLP department and curriculum.  As members of the EDI Committee associated with the SLP program at UofT, we share regular updates in the annual Alumni Newsletter Look Who’s Talking.

Recent Projects

A recent project for the UofT SLP EDI committee has been reviewing and updating an EDI feedback survey we developed in 2021 with the goal of distributing it to current students. The original survey results can be read in the 2022-2023 Alumni newsletter linked here.

We hope to survey each class in the future to monitor EDI-related changes in the program and evaluate anonymous input from the student perspective. Past survey results were used to make suggestions to the department and set goals for our committee. We look forward to continuing to support the SLP Department in spearheading more concrete action items in the 2024-2025 academic year!