Amal Ishaque is the Principal of Cambium Arts & Education. They are an award-winning Equity and Anti-Oppression Consultant, Racial Justice Organizer and Educator. Their work is informed by Muslim, feminist, LGBTQI2S+ and other intersectional communities they are a part of.

Amongst other civic participation, they sit on the board of Marpole Neighbourhood House and the coordinating collective for the Interfaith Institute for Justice, Peace and Social Movements. They are also a co-founder of Marpole Mutual Aid Network (MMAN). MMAN was given an award by the City of Vancouver in 2022 for their mutual aid work.

Amal has over 25 years of experience and expertise doing anti-oppression, equity and intersectional labour relations work in a variety of contexts.

Before founding Cambium Arts & Education, Amal worked for over a decade as a Senior Labour Educator for public sector unions training members, staff and leaders in advanced curriculum design, facilitation skills, intersectionality and transformative models of change.

Through Cambium, Amal works with clients across the labour movement, not for profits, arts organizations, academic institutions, grassroots groups and others to catalyze deeply needed shifts in organizational culture, rooted in transformative justice, equity and liberation.

Book Amal for your next keynote address or panel. Click here.

Amal is frequently invited to provide expertise as a key note speaker and panellist on topics such as:

• Creating organizational cultures of equity

• Developing intersectional labour practices

• Moving beyond diversity to organizational transformation

• Combatting Islamophobia and other forms of structural inequity

• Discrimination as an occupational health & safety issue

• Visioning decolonial futures in our organizations and communities

• Interfaith movement building and more

Amal’s public talks have taken them to stages around the world including the World Social Forum in Brazil, the Left Forum in New York and numerous other large convergences, conferences and global forums.

Amal regularly speaks at academic, union, feminist and other conferences.

Art Initiatives and Creative Practice

Amal is also a highly experienced and widely respected arts educator, interdisciplinary storyteller and Pushcart Prize nominated writer. Their writing has been published widely and can be found at The Feminist Wire, Our Times: Canada’s Independent Labour Magazine, Writing the Walls Down: A Convergence of LGBTQ voices and numerous other publications.

Their poetry was recently added to a national database for teachers in the United States. Amal has new writing forthcoming in an anthology on South Asian poets to be published by Harper Collins India.

Amal has curated many community embedded arts showcases and workshops. Amongst numerous initiatives, they co-developed one of the first BIPOC Futurisms Writing Workshop Series in Vancouver, established Telling It Bent: A Writing Workshop Series for Queer Youth with Frank Theatre and co-founded an annual, interdisciplinary arts showcase centering gender marginalized, queer and trans Muslims. In 2019, they completed a one year arts residency at Carnegie Community Centre in the Downtown Eastside. They were also a teaching artist for many years with Reframing Relations, an arts initiative pairing Indigenous and settler artists together to facilitate arts based workshops on reconciliation and decolonization in schools and community centres.

Keep an eye out for a list of collaborators / associates / partners, coming soon!