Seher Shafiq

Expert Overview

Seher is an expert on issues of civic engagement, politics, policy, and elections.

Seher currently works at North York Community House as the Active Citizenship Manager, where she is co-designing new civic engagement programming that will be adopted by settlement agencies across Canada. Seher is also currently an Editor for Ryerson’s new First Policy Response initiative, which seeks to feature policy ideas that will get us through the COVID-19 crisis and to a fair and sustainable recovery.

In 2019, Seher led the country’s very first national non-partisan voter engagement campaign out of Ryerson’s Democratic Engagement Exchange. As part of this campaign, Seher travelled coast-to-coast to deliver voter engagement trainings to community-based organizations across the country and convened the Canadian Vote Coalition, the first campaign of its kind.

Prior to this, Seher was a Program Manager for the flagship DiverseCity Fellows program at CivicAction, where she worked with hundreds of emerging and senior leaders to tackle some of the biggest challenges facing the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA).

Seher also has experience working in the refugee and resettlement sector at Lifeline Syria, as well as at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. She is a second generation immigrant.