Christiana Agustin 2011 – 2015
Christiana
Agustin attended Blessed Cardinal Newman from 2011 to 2015, where she
participated in Cross Country, Camp Olympia, Student Council and was a
peer helper and mentor. She is currently attending the University of
Toronto, where she is a fourth-year international development studies co-op student working in Bangkok, Thailand.
If
Agustin, who is also working towards a minor in environmental science,
travels an hour out of the city she can explore national parks and
islands full of lush trees, wildlife and see the occasional snake
slithering by her.
Agustin is interning at
The Centre for People and Forests (RECOFTC),
where she is blending her passions for social justice and environmental
science. The international organization works to enhance capacities for
stronger rights, improved governance and fairer benefits for local
people in forest landscapes in seven Asia–Pacific countries through
community forestry.
Community
forestry is an approach to land management that emphasizes land is best
protected when locals have the right to manage it, as opposed to
private companies or governments. Agustin’s work as a monitoring,
evaluation and learning intern involves research and collecting data,
but she says the goal is community forestry.
The
year-long internship will include the opportunity for her to conduct
research toward her undergraduate thesis, which explores the
participation of women in land governance in the Mekong region. She has
her sights on Nepal or Laos as possible locations because of their
rising women’s movements.
“I
would like to identify the challenges they face, and possibly come up
with solutions or tools to help them better navigate these spaces so
they can make a greater impact in the sustainability of their
communities and forest landscapes.”
Her
advocacy ties back to her time in politics. Agustin worked as a
constituency assistant for her MP Gary Anandasangaree (Scarborough-Rouge
Park), then in the Prime Minister’s office in Ottawa this past summer.
With a background in outreach, specifically with Filipino and Indigenous
communities, she worked with the provincial and federal governments on
how to ensure concerns of marginalized groups are considered in
policy-making.
“As
a person of colour, as a woman and as someone who is young, you don’t
always have a voice and there are so many challenges and barriers that
are completely out of my control,” she says. “I want to see at a more
local level if women have those same barriers.”
“It’s
only in discomfort where you’ll grow,” she says. That in itself not
only speaks to growing professionally but also as an individual and to
broaden one’s perspectives on the world.
To see Christiana speaking about women leaders today, click on this link or copy/paste the url below.
https://www.facebook.com/LeadersToday/videos/1663340947045903/
Update
9
January 2021
Christiana graduated in 2020 from the University of
Toronto, Scarborough campus, with a degree in International Development Studies
and Natural Sciences and Environmental Management. She worked as an Outreach
and Operations Assistant in the Office of the Prime Minister for the summers of
2018 and 2019. She recently was a Special Projects Assistant at the
International Student Centre at UTSC and is currently the Executive Assistant
to the Managing Director and Outreach Advisor at the Liberal Research Bureau of
U of T Scarborough.