Activists-in-Residence

Nneka MacGregor (She/Her)

Nneka MacGregor is co-founder and Executive Director of the Women’s Centre for Social Justice, better known as WomenatthecentrE, a unique non-profit created by and for women, trans and gender-diverse survivors of gender-based violence (GBV). As a Black intersectional, Transformative Accountability & Justice practitioner and abolitionist feminist, Nneka is also a respected international speaker & trainer. She is an expert advisory panel member of the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability and sits on several advisory Boards and committees, including the Federal Advisory Council on the Federal Strategy Against GBV, and co-founded the Black Femicide Canada Council. Her research focuses on femicide, sexual violence, and the intersection of strangulation, Traumatic Brain Injury, and Inter-personal violence. 

Nneka received the 2019 PINK Concussions Award and the 2020 YWCA Toronto Women of Distinction Social Justice Award. She is also the founder and Managing Partner of Nneka & Co, a consulting firm of BIPOC activists that focuses on Stakeholder-Centric EDI© – a unique and comprehensive framework to engage organizations in equity, diversity & inclusion work. Her expertise is in nurturing women’s leadership in business at the intersection of gender, race, and ability. Nneka was a member of the Board of Directors of Moatfield Foundation of Bayview Glen School, where she served as Chair and Board President for six years. She supports other charitable and non-profit organizations with governance training and developing an effective Board culture.

Nneka is a very proud mum to her #ThreeWishes, Aly, Alexander, and Christiana, a gushing grandmum to her beautiful grandson, Aidan Azike, and a human companion to Basil, The Wonder Dog, and Renfrew the cat.

If you’re looking for more information about Nneka’s work, you can check her official social media accounts. You can also refer to her January 2024 press conference at Parliament Hill, which was covered by the Toronto Star, and her interview with Natasha Fatah from CBC News Network in 2019. Additionally, you can read the chapter “Femicide in Canada” that she co-authored with Wendy Aujla et al. in The Routledge International Handbook on Femicide and Feminicide (2023), which can provide you with a deeper understanding of her research.

Dr. Marsha Hinds Myrie

Marsha Hinds Myrie’s life and work are an embodiment of dualities and intersections. She is a Barbadian/Canadian citizen with an ancestral, cultural, and intellectual home in Africa. Her career unfolds, sometimes spectacularly and sometimes confusingly, at the intersections of activism and education. She is a public intellectual steeped in the Caribbean intellectual tradition and critical studies.

Marsha spent 23 years developing an advocacy model to address the issues of underprivileged groups of women in Barbados and the Commonwealth Caribbean. The major focus of the work is to develop and encourage the use of victim-defined services for women and girls affected by various types of gender-based violence while at the same time removing the burden of eradicating violence from women and victims by forcing greater attention to systemic oppression and a stronger lobby in policy spaces.

The philosophical mooring for Marsha’s interaction with equity work comes partly out of her Ph.D. research, which focused on the ways in which political and cultural experiences shaped the development and creation of intellectual spaces and intellectual thought in Commonwealth Caribbean tertiary institutions. The epistemological valleys that create disciplines in the Western academy are still immensely uncomfortable for Marsha, but if required, she would classify her work as womanism, Black Studies, philosophy as praxis, and intellectual history.

Marsha is a mother, godmother, aunty, cook, and seamstress, and hopes to learn to garden someday.

Click here to watch the February 6, 2024, CBC coverage of Dr. Hinds Myrie and Ms. MacGregor’s activities at the GET lab.