The Power of Helping Women Find their Voice with Yusra Qadir

In this episode of the Inspire Podcast, Bart welcomes Yusra Qadir, Chief Programs and Advocacy Officer at Mothers Matter Canada, to share her incredible life journey and how she is empowering women to find their voices.

Yusra starts by reflecting on her childhood in Pakistan, her work in community and social development, and her education in human rights. She describes how she found her voice but realized that finding her voice and being able to meaningfully use it are different things. She moved to Canada with young children five years ago, where she navigated the challenges of being a new immigrant and found ways to help others through her own experiences. She also found challenges that women face in this world are universal.

She joined Mothers Matter Canada to help immigrant and refugee women in Canada access the support they need to find their confidence so they can meaningfully use their voices within their lives and their communities. She highlights the impactful work of Mothers Matter Canada, particularly the HIPPY program, which supports newcomer mothers in preparing their children for success while building the skills and resilience they need to thrive.

Yusra’s story is a testament to her strength and commitment, both in her personal journey and in the transformative work she does today.

Visit Mothers Matter Canada to learn more and connect with Yusra on LinkedIn here. You can also find Mothers Matter Canada on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.

Show Notes

00:28 Standard show intro
01:04 Introducing Yusra
02:16 What is "Mothers Matters Canada"
02:50 Equity advocacy
03:25 The challenges that mothers are facing
05:52 What does MMC do to help?
06:59 Peer-based programs
09:51 Yusra's journey to now
10:52 Experiences growing up in Pakistan
12:14 Dreaming big as a child
13:23 Feminist focus
13:50 Disaster preparedness
14:30 Large displacements around the world
15:22 Diverse groups that they work with
16:17 Canada struggles with women's opportunities
17:09 Why come to Canada?
17:43 Becoming dangerous to be an activist
20:29 The challenges of a new immigrant
23:15 Developing leadership skills
25:44 Bart talks about "taking the stage" program
26:35 1/4 women in Canada are "racialized"
26:53 The motherhood penalty
27:08 What the program does
28:07 What is the HIPPIE program?
29:50 Summary of HIPPIE
30:31 Great data management system
31:30 Getting children ready for school
32:24 Example of a personal story
37:33 The ambassador program
39:07 Her hopes for newcomers 5-10 years from now
39:35 Universally available programs
40:01 Her hope for women
40:56 Thank yous
41:20 Outro

Show Transcript 

Yusra Qadir: My hope is that all mothers have the chance to contribute to their families, to be able to contribute to the community, and have autonomy over themselves—the decision-making ability to decide things for their children and their families. And they have the opportunities to benefit from what Canada has to offer and also the opportunity to give what they can give to this country.

Bart Egnal: Welcome to the Inspire podcast, where we examine what it takes to intentionally inspire. I'm your host, Bart Egnal, president and CEO of The Humphrey Group. And if you've ever asked yourself, "How can you develop an authentic leadership presence?" or "How can you tell stories that have people hanging off every word?" well, then this podcast is for you. And it’s not just for executives. This is a podcast for anyone who wants to influence and inspire others in their work, but also in their life.

So my guest on today's episode of the Inspire podcast is Yusra Qadir. Yusra is the Chief Programs and Advocacy Officer of Mothers Matters Canada. And if you haven't heard of Mothers Matters Canada, well, you're both not alone, but you should. You know, I hadn't heard of it a year ago until I met with Amy Robishard, who had been on this podcast talking about Dress for Success and who had just become the executive director. She said, “You should really know about the powerful work we’re doing to support women and children to fulfill their potential.” Since then, I've been really honored to join the board. I’ve met Yusra, and she’s got an amazing story that centers around helping women find their voices. I wanted to have her on the pod to talk about her own journey and the work that she’s doing today. Yusra joins me from Vancouver.

Bart Egnal: Yusra, welcome to the Inspire podcast.

Yusra Qadir: Thanks, Bart, for having me.

Bart Egnal: It's a great pleasure to have you. I know we're recording this in mid-August. We’re going to meet in person next week, at my first in-person board meeting. You do incredible work at Mothers Matters Canada. For those who haven't heard of it, give the Kohl’s notes. What is the organization's vision, and what work does it do day in and day out with women and mothers across the country?

Yusra Qadir: Thanks, Bart. The Mothers Matter Canada vision is a Canada where all mothers and children achieve their highest potential and are actively engaged in their communities. I know in Canada, we have a diverse fabric of people, communities that come from all over the world, and in this multicultural mosaic, it’s not equitable all the time. So our work really brings in that equity and advocacy piece where we advocate for and empower isolated and at-risk mothers through innovative social interventions that change things, like the way society views newcomer and refugee women and children, in a very passive, aid-receiving sort of way, to resilient, powerful individuals who have a lot to contribute.

Bart Egnal: This country—and talk a bit about, if you would—you mentioned the challenges that many face in Canada, and particularly new arrivals to Canada. What are some of the things that you’ve observed that Mothers Matters Canada helps with?

Yusra Qadir: So, before I tell you that, Canada, I know, everybody knows because there's a lot of migration talk. Look at the policy level: Canada has been accepting almost 500,000 new immigrants every year for economic development, for having a more robust population in Canada, supporting it. And 500,000 people are a lot of people. Sometimes people come for economic migration, sometimes people come in as refugees, sometimes people are looking for sanctuary, and they're more economically able than the refugees. So when they come in, the settlement process is a gendered process in many ways, because these people are coming from all across the world, from different environments, from different countries, where there were perhaps different gender norms, different traditions, different values, different languages. So there's a high level of difficulty in settlement because, one, you need to understand the new place you're in. You cannot do that unless you have really high English or French language skills. And then, you know, the culture is different, the school system's different, the way people go to university is different. A lot of people are stuck in displacement before they get to Canada, and they think Canada is going to be the solution to all their problems. But they arrive here amidst healthcare, early childhood education, and housing crises. So for these issues that Canadians are finding so difficult to navigate and facing some real challenges in going through, it’s completely overwhelming that a newcomer has to understand and navigate through those.

Bart Egnal: Yeah, I mean, I think you've put it so eloquently. We who have grown up in Canada or who have lived here and understand the culture and language still find it challenging. So you can imagine if you're in a language or cultural barrier and you're having to seek employment, you’ve been displaced from your family. It’s just exponentially harder.

Yusra Qadir: Yes. So we have a very, our philosophy, I find incredibly moving and motivational. I also deeply believe in it. We think that when mothers thrive, children flourish, and communities prosper, because when we work with mothers, we are working with some foundational pieces in the family. When we look at the mother's confidence, when we look at the mother's capacity, and when we look at the mother's ability to be able to access services for her children and for her whole family. So our programs are very peer-based. We work with mothers to build them up, really. And when I say we work with mothers, we work with mothers through almost 40 service delivery organizations across the country. Every year, the Mothers Matter Canada partners serve almost 1,600 newcomer and refugee women and their 1,800 children. And what we do is that we employ mothers from the local communities, and these mothers work closely with the clients over one to three years. And we say, you know, the more vulnerable, the more difficulty the mothers find themselves in, the higher the dosage and timing of the projects or support is that they need to get back on their feet and really be able to adjust well in Canada. So our programs are very peer-based. They are very mother-to-mother, woman-to-woman approach. So there isn’t a savior complex in the program. One of the unique things that I love about our work is that when we work with mothers, we're not going in like, “Hey, you know, you're vulnerable because of, you know, language skills or your ability to find a job or whatever, and we are here to help you.” No, it’s always like a mother going into a home saying, “Hey, you know, I've been here, I've done that. I know it's incredibly difficult. You are so brave that you've taken the first step. How can I help you support your family and how can I help you reach your goals?” So our programs are home-based, they’re home visitation-based. They’re not for everyone. They are for people who are extremely isolated, extremely vulnerable, yet extremely resilient and really motivated to change things for themselves and their families. And we work with families on a weekly basis. And, it's amazing what that trust does. And it’s amazing how we see women and children and families really transform over the time that they spend in our programs.

Bart Egnal: It is really amazing. I mean, there are so many things that excited me and resonated with me when I started learning more about Mothers Matters and the work. You know, for one, the fact that many of the women who go through this program themselves go and deliver it later. You know, that it’s not kind of professional trainers coming in—that they’re, as you say, passing on their own experiences. And second, you know, the impact it makes, I think, is so powerful. And so I want to just put them in the parking lot. We'll come back because I want to take a step back and talk a bit about you.

And, you know, you mentioned Canada welcomes so many immigrants. My parents were both immigrants. You know, I think it’s a country built on, you know, bringing talented, driven people in, and then we need to support them. And you are a great example of that. You didn’t grow up here, and yet you've moved to Canada. You've brought incredible credentials. You have three degrees—a BA in sociology, psychology, two masters, one in sociology, one in human rights. And you've done so many amazing things in the world. So let's talk about your journey that led you here and how it led to the development of your voice and then ultimately, how that’s played into the work that you’re doing today, which in some ways is helping women find their voice. They find their voice as newcomers, and then they find their voice by helping those newcomers. Tell me about where you grew up and your early formative experiences that led you to Canada.

Yusra Qadir: Well, thanks, Bart. And I have to confess, I haven’t talked much about my story ever before on a public platform. But I am an immigrant in Canada. I am today five years and 13 days old in Canada. So I came here on August 1, 2019. And what an action-packed five years these have been. I come from Pakistan, which is a small country with a not-so-small population. It has a population of 235 million people, the fifth most populous country in the world. And I grew up with working-class parents. My mother, she was a single mother in a very conservative, very traditional, value-based society, and a very traditional, value-based approach to family kind of society. So, growing up, I saw a lot of things firsthand, like, what is it like for a woman, for a mother to be separated from a man and to navigate society by herself? And it's become so much more normalized now. At that time, in that space, it was a big thing. It was extremely isolating. It was really something that would make a lot of opportunities redundant for you socially, emotionally, psychologically. And, you know, the one thing that my mother always emphasized was education and, you know, having the ability to raise your voice in whatever way—whether you could say something, whether you could write something, whether you could go be a part of, you know, protest or something that’s about a good cause. There was always that piece there, and I think those pieces were incredibly inspirational for me growing up as a child. And my gift and my curse was that I loved dreaming big. And at that time, it made me sort of, you know, a little girl watching these travel shows about, you know, like the Eiffel Tower or, you know, the London Bridge or the Big Ben. I was like, I'm gonna go there. And people were like, “Oh, my God, you know, nobody gets out of here. Where are you gonna go?” But that’s the thing, right? Like, all the families that we work with, we don’t take a moment to see what their dreams, what their aspirations, what their ambitions are. And given the right kind of support, there are always pathways that take people to their dreams, because we have these innate abilities. So I was in Pakistan. My education was there, and then I really wanted to do something that mattered or that created a change. And growing up with a strong female model and knowing that other people don’t have the same opportunity that I had with a very enabling mother who trusted in us, I wanted to work more on building women, building mothers, all the human rights with women’s and a feminist lens focus. And that’s the path that I followed. I worked with human rights-based groups like ActionAid and Oxfam. In Pakistan, there were a lot of disasters being caused by climate change. Lots of droughts, floods. We had a huge earthquake in 2005, and that sort of got me involved in disaster preparedness and emergency response programs as well, bringing sort of the human rights lens to it, because it’s always so vital. And I was working there, and I went to Europe to pursue a master’s in human rights practice, saw how things are done around the world. We were 17 people in that cohort, and all 17 were from a different country. The learning wasn’t in the classroom; it was in the corridors and in the discussions we had with each other. And after that, I got involved in the larger displacements around the world, like the Syrian displacement, where a lot of people migrated to Greece. And I was involved in some capacity to support with the fundraising and reporting processes on that. And that is just no looking back, right?

Bart Egnal: You've come a long way from the, you know, the young dreams, right? You were really, in essence, kind of probably living everything and then some that you'd hoped for, and that when your mom encouraged you to have the voice and to speak up, it must have felt great.

Yusra Qadir: Yep. Yep, it did. And it also, you know, it’s more inspiring, right? Because you think that, okay, you know, against popular belief, there's so much ability, so much resilience, like in the families that we work with.

Bart Egnal: So we talked about diversity, Bart. And I said, you know, we serve around 1,600 mothers across Canada every year. What I did not mention was that these mothers come from 98 countries and speak 78 languages. So it's an incredibly diverse group. I spoke to a refugee mother recently when we were trying to get some stories together for World Refugee Day. And she’s Eritrean, and she was displaced for 14 years before she got to Canada. And she went through four countries before she could come to Canada. And being a woman is limiting, especially where you find yourself in the world. And I'm going to talk about Canada because for me, it was a big thing. Because you live in the middle-income or low-income parts of the world, and you realize, okay, you realize, or you make some sort of a justification where you say, okay, these countries don't have the resources, there's more conflict. Maybe there's weaponization of religion or traditions or whatnot, and that’s denied women the opportunities. That's why the rates of violence are so high, and that's why there's poverty and low-income families. For me to come to Canada and discover all the same challenges are here as well.

Bart Egnal: In all, it wasn’t nirvana.

Yusra Qadir: Yeah. I was like, “Not even!” Nirvana was so far away because I was, “Oh, my God, how is it possible?”

Bart Egnal: Right. So let's just step back for a moment to your life. So you've gone to Europe, you've done your master’s in human rights, you're involved in tackling global displacements. You’re a powerhouse. And how did you go from there to saying, “You know, I'm going to move to Canada.” Talk a bit about your decision and what those early days were like following that move.

Yusra Qadir: So I talked, and I always. I was quick to raise my voice and my pen to things that I did not agree with. We had quite a few human rights violations around the world, including in Pakistan. And I wouldn't, you know, it’s not from my ethical framework. I could not keep quiet about it. So I was doing a lot of writing, a lot of talking, a lot of attending protests. And it was becoming dangerous in the sense that, you know, if I’m writing something in a paper and it’s getting published, but the crux of it is being edited away or being taken away, it was extremely disturbing for me. And it got to a point where I felt like I could not say the things that I believed in or do the things that I wanted to do without coming in harm's way. So, you know, I’d been to other parts of the world, and I knew that I could continue doing this work. So I don’t know why it happened, why I ended up in Canada. I went to Google. I’m also a fan of just searching something up. You don’t know about something? Just put it in Google, right?

Bart Egnal: Why not Google, “Where should I live?”

Yusra Qadir: I don’t know what I Googled, but I know Canada came up, and I looked at it, and the process seemed simplistic. And I was incredibly lucky in terms of my case. It processed very, very quickly, and I was accepted. I got my PR, and then I thought I’d just make the move. And like so many immigrants that are coming to Canada and the ones that we're working with, the first and foremost issue is finding a job and finding employment. And when you convert the Pakistani currency to Canadian dollars, you're really left with nothing. And so I think I did face some challenges, but I want to say that I still feel I was incredibly privileged because I met the right people and I was plugged into the right networks. Otherwise, the story would have been very different.

Bart Egnal: Right. To your point, you came with all the, in some ways, language skills, education, professional capabilities. You'd worked in global institutions, and yet it was still challenging. It was still challenging. And so, to your point, those who are navigating arriving to Canada without some of those advantages, it’s particularly difficult. Did your experience coming kind of inform how you do the work you do now in Mothers Matters Canada?

Yusra Qadir: Yes. Yes, it does. And you phrased it really well, Bart. I always think that I had, you know, I had no problem with the language. Pakistan was a British colony for a long, long time, so English is one of our official languages. So I had no problem with language. I had academic credentials. I had no social mobility issues. I could take a bus. I had that confidence. But still, you know, nothing prepares you for when an employment agency tells you, “You know, go, you know, here's a job from Leon's or in Walmart,” and you’re looking at it like, “You know, but I have two master’s degrees. Why should I go to Walmart to do this job?” Or nothing prepares you when your kid comes home from school—like kindergarten, grade one—saying, “You know, my class was laughing at me because my lunch smells weird.” And so it’s really hard and, you know, racism's alive and well in Canada, and we see it manifesting in very real ways. So I think, yes, I’m able to often see how the challenge is so much worse because, you know, when I wanted to enroll my kids in school, it happened differently back home. So I kept making all these calls, and then I realized, “Oh, you know, I went to the school and they were like, no.” And then I went to the school district's office, and the process was different. And then you need witnesses, and then you need emergency contacts, and you as a new person, you don’t have those. And, you know, when you’re getting, you need utility bills to prove that, you know, this is your catchment school, and you don’t realize that your phone bill is not your utility bill. The utility bills are different bills.

Bart Egnal: So it’s stressful enough, right?

Yusra Qadir: And that is when you have the money to set yourself up in Canada and you have the language to understand what people are saying, and you know which bus to take to go where. And you are Google literate; you can find things out for yourself. So this process is incredibly difficult for people who don’t have those skills in place. And that's why I love the work that we do because it is such critical and necessary work, and we know, we know this, that if we do not offer this support in a very real way that works for the families that we're working with, they will slip through the cracks, and we don’t want that.

Bart Egnal: So I know a big—and thanks for sharing some of the difficult experiences. The Walmart job just kind of brings it home.

Yusra Qadir: So before I came, I was working with the United Nations as a social inclusion and youth engagement specialist, and it was a very professional position. It was a senior position. I was in charge of various pillars, you know, dispensing, making sure, you know, six to eight million dollars are expended well each year. And coming to Canada, I think I was lucky that I did secure the job before I got here. And I want to give a shout-out to Mothers Matter Canada, that they did risk it on somebody who wasn’t here and who didn’t have previous Canadian experience. So they took that chance on me. Former CEO Debbie Bell, she was a visionary, and she said, “Okay, you know, here, I’ll give you the job. Come prove yourself. You have a year. This project is ending.” And I had, like, this baby, this one baby project, and I joined in as a program officer to manage that one project. So career-wise, I was eight years back—like, it was an eight-year cut, and I took it. I was grateful for taking it. At least it’s my own field. At least I’m values-aligned with the work. I really believe in it. But because of the way I was raised, the way that I had worked, always, I was a sound believer in raising my voice and advocating for myself. I did go back to MMC again and again and again, saying, “You know, I want to do this. Have you thought of this? Can we build this? I think this would be great.” And I came here, and I realized there’s such amazing work happening at the organization. It has to be the world’s best-kept secret.

Bart Egnal: It is. It really is.

Yusra Qadir: Yeah. So that started. I did, you know, and I think it’s very important for other immigrants, especially women, especially mothers, to know I did go back again and again to the senior management at that time, saying, “You know, I deserve more money. You need to pay me more.” And they did. But, Bart, if I didn’t go, if I didn’t ask, I’d still be the program officer. Because there is value in finding your voice. There is value in raising it.

Bart Egnal: There is. Well, you may or may not know, but one of the things The Humphrey Group has long done is work in diversity, equity, and inclusion. We have a longstanding program for women called Taking the Stage that really empowers women to do exactly what you did, which is speak up, find your voice, receive recognition. Because we often find that women are more humble than men. That’s a generalization, but men do tend to brag more about things maybe they haven’t done. And women downplay their achievements. It can result in impacts in terms of wage gap and opportunities missed. So good for you for finding your voice. And I hear you’re encouraging other women to do the same.

Yusra Qadir: And we're really looking forward to building out an ambassador's program where the women and the families we work with, they can tell their own stories. So it’s really interesting that one fourth of women in Canada are racialized, and there's so many immigrant women coming to the country with university education or higher, and they can’t find employment that is relevant to their skills or their field. Same with men. But it’s even worse with women because as women, as mothers, we have to pay what we call the motherhood penalty. And these are very real issues which mean very real things for the children, for the full family. So we do employ mothers at the community level, and we say, okay, you know, we don’t need any Canadian experience. We don’t need any other skills. If you’re a mother, we know you can manage conflict, we know you can prioritize and organize and do a lot of things to make a home run and raise kids. And we’ve had really good results with that. So we work on a work-learn model. We recruit the mothers, they outreach to other mothers, we find our clients that way. And then these mothers, they’re paid, they’re hired as part-time staff so that they can manage their domestic care work alongside generating an income and logging in that Canadian experience. Because if nobody's going to hire them, they can't get Canadian experience from anyone.

Bart Egnal: Right? You can’t have no experience or you can’t get experience. So maybe that’s a good segue to the main program, HIPPY, that does all this important work with mothers. What is HIPPY and why is it so impactful?

Yusra Qadir: Yes. So HIPPY is one of our flagship programs. So at MMC, Bart, we’re doing two things. One is HIPPY, which is the Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters program. It’s a large name for programs.

Bart Egnal: Large name, large impact. And it’s a global program. I mean, this is a program. I think it’s worth saying that this is a program that’s delivered all around the world, that MMC is the Canadian overseer of this implementation. Is that right? Am I getting it right?

Yusra Qadir: Yes, you are. So it is an international program. There’s been a very big HIPPY program in the US for 40 years. There’s a large program in Australia and New Zealand, there’s some in Europe. And it’s great to have that sort of community of practice where you can look at each other’s research and approaches and make the program better and better. The Mothers Matter Canada is the licensing authority for the program in Canada. So if there’s a service delivery organization in Canada that wants to roll out the program, they have to be licensed through us and our job is then to make sure that that partner is able to deliver the best possible program to their community and also to make sure that HIPPY delivered in Charlottetown in PEI and HIPPY delivered in Nanaimo in BC are the same. So the program quality and the integrity—that’s a large part of our role.

Bart Egnal: Okay.

Yusra Qadir: It’s, I think, one of the hard things about my job is summing up HIPPY into a couple of sentences. It is, I’d say HIPPY is a holistic, gender-based program that works with the mother to build her confidence, capacity, and community connections so that she’s able to access services for herself, for her children, for her entire family, and then really support that mother to live a robust and full life in Canada as an active parent and as an involved citizen in the society. In a nutshell, I think that’s what HIPPY does. So we have outcomes of HIPPY at three levels, and we’re very privileged because we have a great data management system. You talked about our CEO, Amy Robishaw, and Amy tends to say that, “I feel like I’m a dragon sitting on a pile of amazing gold and gold.” So she is, I mean, she’s the best of dragons—not the popular dragon that doesn’t want the gold and doing some work around it. But we are able to track outcomes in real time. So we track the impact at the mother’s level. So how is the confidence improving? How is the capacity and access to services improving? How is the self-esteem or the parental agency piece moving for the mother? If you look at the child, the child ends up school-ready. So the program is for parents of children that are preschool age, because when the child goes to school in a standard public education system, there are certain expectations. And if the child is unable to live up or show those or fulfill those expectations, they’re very quickly labeled as troublemakers. And it takes children a moment to figure out how they’ve been labeled, and they live up to that label. So that really impacts their academic trajectory and life trajectory. So HIPPY children go to school school-ready, and that’s a great platform and start for a life that has the power to break the cycle of intergenerational isolation and poverty and do great things for the family.

Bart Egnal: Those are incredible impacts. Let’s bring it into what it is. And maybe, you know, you could anonymize the person you tell me about here, but tell me the story of a mother who arrived in Canada and who found HIPPY and the impact it made on her and her family.

Yusra Qadir: Okay, so I'll talk to you about a mother. I wouldn’t anonymize it because, you know, she’s an amazing mother. I want to talk about her. We have all sorts of great stories.

Bart Egnal: Okay, even better.

Yusra Qadir: Yeah. I'll talk about a woman called Johanna, and she works with a diversity community resource society here in Surrey, BC. She came to Canada as an immigrant, and she was overwhelmed, like so many women are, with the settlement process. And she found HIPPY.

Bart Egnal: And how did she find it?

Yusra Qadir: She found it through her cultural community. So a lot of HIPPY clients come in through word of mouth. When we're training, Bart, our home visitors, our staff, on how to find HIPPY families, we say, “Okay, what are five ways we can recruit HIPPY families?” And then they come up with five ways. We cross them out and we say, “Okay, these are the easy ways. What are the more difficult ways to reach families that are hard to reach?” So we recruit through door knocking and subsidized housing. We recruit on the bus, in the supermarket, in the school’s parking lot, in the playground. So if you see a woman with a large bag and flyers, that’s most likely a HIPPY home visitor.

Bart Egnal: So she came. So, sorry. Just to bring it back to her. So she came in through her community. Okay, she comes, and then what happened? What was her experience?

Yusra Qadir: She received home visits. She was part of group meetings, and she found the one piece that was building for her was the bond between her and her daughter, and that was getting stronger. She felt extremely empowered by the fact that she was able to build her child’s school readiness skills. And so if you can teach the child to open a door or do this exercise or to write, or read a book with them, you can also maybe take the bus or go to the library and do other things. So she found her confidence was building, and then she became a single parent, and then navigating society was even harder. But she found support and emotional support and urging on, even through her HIPPY home visitor.

Bart Egnal: Was it the same person who was with her the whole time?

Yusra Qadir: Yes, it was the same person.

Bart Egnal: How long did they work together?

Yusra Qadir: They worked a couple of years.

Bart Egnal: Okay.

Yusra Qadir: And so she saw her confidence building. She was able to do more. And then she found an opportunity within the program and she was recruited as a home visitor. And now she is helping other mothers. I recently went on a home visit with her where she was helping another single mother in Vancouver with her settlement journey in Canada. And it really comes full circle that way.

Bart Egnal: So she was able—I mean, talk about the challenges of new arrival and then what you mentioned there, becoming a single parent, a whole other challenge. So to have that support must have been invaluable for her. And then incredible that she's now doing the same. I mean, I can only imagine as she's going through helping new arrivals to be able to share her own experiences. It’s tremendous.

Yusra Qadir: And that’s what keeps the wheels rolling on the program. So she did. I think the biggest fight is getting your own confidence and self-esteem back because as you navigate a new space, what this story is about is finding that power and that confidence within herself. Often it takes another person saying, “You know, I believe in you. You can do it.” And really, that’s all it boils down to. And that’s done consistently, again and again, every week.

Bart Egnal: We leverage mothers' motivation for wanting the best chance at life for their children. What were your challenges? How can we help you? And then there’s—don’t forget the change that's happening at the child level as the mothers go through this process, because we get into these homes of these mothers, because we leverage their motivation for wanting the best chance at life for their children. If we went door knocking saying, “Here’s a women’s program, here’s a confidence-building program,” we wouldn’t get in. So when the mothers see changes in their child and they know that “My child is improving” or “My child is getting somewhere” or “My child is learning new skills,” because they don’t have the money to send their children to preschools or early childhood education programs, and when they see that change happening, they’re more involved, more invested, and as they build their child up, they build up themselves.

Bart Egnal: I love the impact, and I love that story. And I know you've talked about in the future there can be an ambassador program. What would that program be? And how might this mother be involved in it?

Yusra Qadir: I hope she agrees to join in when we push it out.

Bart Egnal: Maybe send her this podcast, right?

Yusra Qadir: Yes, absolutely. You know, like, yes, I have lived experience as an immigrant, but it shouldn’t be me telling these stories. Like, it needs to be authentic. It needs to come from the people who have gone through the process and don’t have the privileges that I did, but still made a great life for themselves and their children. And so we're starting an ambassador's program. My colleague Natasha Irwin, who has also worked with Dress for Success, she’s leading on that, and she has done similar work at Dress for Success before. So I’m very excited about that string of work developing further. And the idea is that these mothers, these women, they are able to tell their story themselves because, you know, it’s their victory. It’s their shine. We’re happy to share in it, but they should have all of it.

Bart Egnal: I love it. And that will, of course, just bring more women to the program. So, Yusra, I know we could talk forever about this. We'll talk more about it next week in person at the board off-site. But I’ll leave you with one thought. What is your hope for the future of helping newcomers in Canada? You've been a newcomer. You’re in the business of helping newcomers. What would be your aspiration in 5–10 years from now?

Yusra Qadir: So, newcomers are one thing. I want to talk generally about mothers and women, Bart, because my hope and my vision is because I’ve seen these challenges in newcomers, as well as other people who are living below the low-income threshold or have been in Canada for a long time or were born here. I hope that programs like HIPPY are universally accessible for people who need them, because that’s the thing with human rights. We’re born with them. We need to be able to access them no matter where we are from, what we have in our basket. It needs to be consistent. It needs to be equal in all senses of the word. So my hope really—and I hope it doesn’t take 5, 10, 15 years. My hope is that all mothers have the chance to contribute to their families, to be able to contribute to the community, and have autonomy over themselves—the decision-making ability to decide things for their children and their families. And they have the opportunities to benefit from what Canada has to offer, and also the opportunity to give what they can give to this country. And I know that’s a lot rolled up in terms of a wish list, but believe it or not, these are all fundamental human rights. It shouldn’t be the way that things are right now. And for a country like Canada, which is a developed country and a highly resourced country, I hope everyone—all mothers, all children, all communities—gets to access their fundamental human rights.

Bart Egnal: I think it's a wonderful vision, and if anyone is making progress for our country towards it, it's you and the whole team at Mothers Matters Canada. So thank you for coming on the pod. Thank you for choosing Canada. You’re making it a better country. And thank you for the work that you do on behalf of Canadians, and particularly new Canadians.

Yusra Qadir: Thanks so much.

Bart Egnal: I hope you enjoyed that episode of the Inspire podcast and the conversation that I had with our guest. And hopefully you left with some really practical, tangible tools and tips that you can use to be more consistently inspirational. If you're enjoying the pod, I'll ask you a favor: Please rate and review it. I love the comments, appreciate the reviews, and the visibility allows others to discover the pod. It’s really how word of mouth has spread the Inspire podcast to so many listeners and helped us keep making this great content. Stay tuned. We’ll be back in two weeks with another inspiring conversation. Thanks so much for listening. Go forth and inspire.