Celebrating Women at UBC: Anna White

Photo credit: Cicely Blain

Photo credit: Cicely Blain

Anna and Interests

Anna White is a Student Leadership Coordinator with Access and Diversity at UBC. She is very passionate about developing programs that create space for personal growth and sharing tools for creating social change. One way she does this is as the Camp Director of “CampOUT!” – a summer camp for queer, trans, and allied youth across British Columbia. In the future, she hopes to see the people around her use their imaginations to create and embody new ways of learning and organizing that challenge the social norms of heteronormativity, racism, sexism and ableism.

Anna loves to spend her spare time gardening, ocean swimming, hiking with her dogs, cooking, connecting with family and friends, meditating and reading nerdy Sci-fi and fantasy young adult fiction. “I like science fiction because it’s a path to imagining new worlds or new ways of relating across difference,” she says.

Anna and International Women’s Day

This year on International Women’s Day, Anna is celebrating the women in the Equity Ambassador team who are facilitating change by sharing stories around the campus; she thinks it is cool and really exciting that they have developed this project. Anna is an advocate for social justice. Her passion for creating social change was inspired by her childhood babysitters, who were politically-involved eco-feminist-activists. She is also inspired by her grandmother who committed to learning new things even as she reached her 90s.

Anna and Women’s Issues

One of the issues Anna is passionate about is increasing opportunities for self-identified women as well as trans-identified and gender fluid folks. Anna strives to use her cisgender privilege to act in allyship with trans folks to raise awareness about gender diversity and to invite the people around her to become more accepting and inclusive of all women. She actively addresses this issue by creating opportunities to educate herself, program participants, friends, and family. Through the use of her language and actions she encourages folks to understand their own privilege and assumptions about gender identities.

She says female empowerment means getting up every day, giving thanks to the women that have, and continue to, tend the land that she is a visitor on, recognizing her privilege, challenging her assumptions, striving toward allyship, and using her privilege to create positive social change, one relationship at a time.

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