BHM 2026 – Interview with Ashley Rerrie

For the third year, our digital campaign highlights Black changemakers, innovators and disruptors in Canadian international cooperation. Throughout February, we are profiling leaders whose achievements, challenges and perspectives are transforming the sector and advancing equity, inclusion and justice.

This week, we invite you to meet Ashley Rerrie, Program Officer, Equality Fund.

Why did you decide to work in international cooperation and what have been some career highlights?

I decided to work in international cooperation after a summer volunteering in Nicaragua through a program called Intercordia Canada while I was doing my undergraduate degree. My experience in Nicaragua focused on solidarity, building relationships with, and witnessing alongside the community I was living with. The experience allowed me to understand on a deeper level how the challenges facing us currently are globally interconnected issues, and taught me relationships and solidarity have to be at the heart of our work towards justice. Career highlights include working with a women’s cooperative in rural Nicaragua who were doing incredible work on gender equality and cultural change in their community in my early career. Most recently, I was able to attend the Black Women’s March organized by the Brazilian Afro-feminist movement in Brazil, which brought together over 300,000 activists from across Brazil and around the world. It was incredible to be in a space that showed the vibrancy, diversity, and strength of the Black feminist movement.

What experiences have influenced your career as a Black person in the international cooperation sector?

I come to the international sector as a Black woman who is also coming from a place of privilege: I had the opportunity to pursue higher education, capacity building and leadership training through different Cooperation Canada and regional council initiatives, and the ability to get started by taking internships and volunteer positions. At the same time, I have also seen the ways that the sector is largely tied to Global North norms, resistant to change, perpetuating colonial power dynamics, and have experienced the day to day microaggressions, dismissal of experience, and the ways whiteness operates under the pretense of international development and multiculturalism. I am extremely grateful to the Black women who are and have been my colleagues and leaders, for showing what a different kind of leadership can look like and how to challenge racism and harmful power dynamics across the sector.

In the face of shrinking civic space and the silencing of marginalized and disenfranchised people, what are your hopes for the future, and what advice would you give to those seeking to work in international cooperation as change-makers, advocates or allies?

The current global moment is fraught and brings increasingly complex challenges, from shifting geopolitics to shrinking civic space, to ongoing genocides and urgent humanitarian and climate crises. My hope is that we can hold onto our humanity, continue to pay sustained attention to these crises, and have the courage to do things differently in the sector. Our work needs to be based on trust and the recognition that our struggles are all deeply intertwined. Hope needs to be a discipline (a refusal to participate in despair and nihilism), and also a call to action. Pay attention to, and listen to, people doing the work on a local level. Trust that they know where and how to move. I still maintain that relationships are at the heart of all that we can accomplish together. As important as technical work is, cultivating relationships plays a key role in how we are able to respond to increasingly complicated and global challenges.