The Afiya Team

  • Ashley Dornan, MSN-NP(c), RN, BScN

    CO-DIRECTOR

    Ashley is a Nurse Practitioner candidate, Registered Nurse with Vancouver Coastal Health, and faculty member at the BCIT School of Nursing. Ashley's work focuses on combining her medical background with her lived experience as a Black woman to create safe health care systems that serve the Black community.

  • Mahado Hassan, BSc, MPH (c)

    CO-DIRECTOR

    Mahado is a MPH student and works very closely with the Surrey community as Co-director of Solid-State. Hassan’s knowledge of public health, community organizing, and lived experiences as a Black woman raised in Surrey will be integral to this research.

  • Nafissa Nur, RN, BScN

    CO-DIRECTOR

    Nafiisa is a Registered Nurse with Vancouver Coastal Health. Through personal experiences, Nafiisa finds primary health care to be broken and especially unfair to the Black community. Constantly seeing the result of this, Nafiisa plans to focus her work on alleviating health disparities and promoting health literacy to the Black community.

  • Veronika Achor, MA

    PROJECT COORDINATOR

    Veronika is a policy analyst in the Government of Canada with a Master's in Conflict Studies from Saint Paul’s University/University of Ottawa and a BAH in Political Studies from Queen’s University. Her experience in Health Canada’s COVID-19 Task Force, where she facilitated data integration and stakeholder engagement to ensure accurate and equitable pandemic responses, has inspired her to pursue opportunities to address systemic barriers and promote holistic, culturally driven care for Black communities in Canada.