Natasha Aruliah
Natasha identifies as a racialized, immigrant settler and currently lives and works on the unceded and traditional territories of the sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) nations, also known as Vancouver, Canada. She is a Sri Lankan Tamil, born in the UK, and part of the growing Tamil diaspora.
Originally trained as a counseling psychologist, she worked as a therapist with immigrant, refugee and marginalized communities. There she witnessed the impact of the systems and structures on people and the assault on their identity. Both through understanding her own lived experience, and her identity and witnessing others grapple with theirs, she moved into working more comprehensively with the systems and structures that cause harm, inequity and injustice.
She now works as a facilitator, consultant, educator, and coach, specializing in diversity, equity, inclusion, social justice, and transformative change for both individuals and organizations. With over 25 years of experience across the UK, Europe, USA and Canada and internationally, her work focuses on lasting systemic change addressing colonial legacies and using anti-oppressive, decolonizing practice. Her work is grounded in interdisciplinary practices integrating intercultural competence and cultural humility/safety, emotional intelligence and embodied practice, critical thinking, leadership and management development, transformative organizational development, and social justice and anti-oppression.
She leads workshops and retreats, facilitates brave conversations in teams, coaches key staff and board members, as well as conducts organization assessments, and policy and process reviews. She strives to create spaces for all voices to be brought in and supports dialogue, often difficult and courageous, across differences and on topics that are usually avoided, taboo and challenging. In particular, she seeks to support organizations to transform and change both for their staff and the people they serve. Her work has included a government initiative facilitating community dialogues on racism around the province of British Columbia as part of an anti-hate-crimes strategy.
Her work is informed by her personal experience as an immigrant, woman of color, a parent of bi-racial children and caregiver to aging, immigrant parents. She is currently writing a book about her work and specifically the role of identity.
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/natasha-aruliah/20/714/750
