Building community with the African Alumni Association

There are more than 230,000 Waterloo alumni located all over the world. The beauty of having such a large, global community is that you're bound to find other alumni you can connect with — people who come from a similar background, live in the same city, or share the same interests as you. 

In this episode, we speak with alumni who are helping to facilitate those connections. Thoko Phiri (PhD '18) and Margaret Mutumba (PhD '23) both came to Waterloo as international graduate students in the Health Faculty. After graduation, they stayed connected with a large group of African students and alumni, finding and providing support within that community. 

Last year they connected with the University's Alumni Relations office, looking to expand the group. Today, the African Alumni Association is one of our volunteer-driven alumni groups that works with Waterloo to connect and support graduates worldwide. Thoko and Margaret join the podcast to share how the association got started, what supports are available, and how you can get involved.

Mentioned in this episode
Sankofa Pathways to University: https://bit.ly/440guMz
Bring on the Sunshine: https://bringonthesunshine.ca/
Follow the African Alumni Association on Instagram: @uowaaa
Follow the African Alumni Association on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/uwaaa/
Email the African Alumni Association: uwafricanalumni@gmail.com
Find more Alumni Affinity Groups for Waterloo grads: https://bit.ly/3QAb1sK

Transcript

Margaret: 0:00

It's really coming together and identifying challenges or opportunities that we all have encountered as a group and then being part of creating an environment that's inclusive, where folks who, as you said students benefit because they come and find established structures that they can draw inspiration from, support from both professionally and not professionally as well. For me, it has brought me lifelong friendships. I've also learned a lot through the different journeys that many of our memberships have been able to have, and then, of course, opportunities like this to be on the podcast right.

Meg: 0:45

There are more than 230,000 Waterloo alumni located all over the world. The beauty of having such a large global community is that you're bound to find other alumni. You can connect with people who come from a similar background, live in the same city or share the same interests as you. In this episode, I'm very excited to speak with some alumni who are helping to facilitate those connections. Thoko Phiri and Margaret Mutumba both came to Waterloo as international graduate students in the health faculty. After graduation, they stayed connected with a large group of African students and alumni, finding and providing support within that community. Last year, they connected with the university's alumni relations office, looking to expand the group Today. The African Alumni Association is one of our volunteer-driven alumni groups that works with Waterloo to connect and support graduates worldwide. Thoko and Margaret joined the podcast today to share how the association got started, what supports are available and how you could get involved. Keep listening, all right, Thoko and Margaret. Thank you so much for joining the podcast today.

Thoko: 2:00

Yes, thank you for having us.

Margaret: 2:02

Thank you for having us.

Meg: 2:04

Yeah, I'm really excited to have you on to talk about the African Alumni Association and also your experiences at Waterloo. So I want to start actually with the beginning of your experiences with Waterloo. You both made the decision to move to Canada to complete graduate degrees and you both happened to study in the health faculty. What made you decide to move here and come to Waterloo for grad studies?

Thoko: 2:31

Okay, well, for me it was serendipity. I have a background in economics, so my bachelor's degree was in economics, with a bias towards economic development, so anything with development really excited me. So when I did my master's that was in economic development and that was in the UK. When I returned home to Malawi that's where I'm from originally I got a job as a social economics manager for some studies that were just for health so community health, focusing on maternal and child health and that just excited me. The paper to that was really great for me.

Thoko: 3:22

It was a great experience that I decided to focus more on health than economics but as a way to get into a graduate program for PhD. I wanted to do a PhD in like a niche area, looking at droughts and then the impact intergenerational impact on having been exposed to drought and then having offspring and something around that area. And so what I did was I did a search for somebody who was interested in economic evaluation methods and worked in the area of nutrition, specifically maternal and child health and nutrition, and so the person I found was a professor who was at the University of Waterloo, which was in Canada. So it just worked out that way that the graduate school that I stumbled upon was at the University of Waterloo.

Meg: 4:25

Yeah, that's great. I think that's probably the case for a lot of people. That's a little serendipitous. What about you, Margaret?

Margaret: 4:35

So I guess mine was more of a personal reason more rather than professionally. But my brother had come to school to Canada. He had gone to a university in Halifax, so I had had the opportunity to visit Canada and at the time I thought, oh, I quite like Canada, I could live here is what I thought at the time, but had not decided to do my PhD. A couple of years later, when I did decide I was ready to do my PhD, it made sense for me to want to come to Canada. That means I get to spend time with my brother.

Margaret: 5:10

But I was looking again, like Thoko said, I was looking for a public health and health systems program and so I. At the time I think most universities had health sciences or public health sciences, and so first the name of the program is what attracted me. And then when I looked through the faculty list, very impressed by the work my supervisor had done, and I appreciated how responsive the University of Waterloo graduate coordinators were with all my inquiries and at the time I had a little one as well and there's a lot of support for graduate students with families and that's something I really appreciated. I had already done the UK and so I was ready to explore a different context, and so Waterloo is perfect because it's not Toronto, but then it's not so far from Toronto as well, and the program was looked very interesting from the course outlined, and so that's how my path led me to Waterloo.

Meg: 6:07

Yeah, both really great stories and different considerations for each of you, but I think things that a lot of people can probably relate to that your comment, Margaret, about it's close to Toronto but it's not Toronto that's definitely a plus for a lot of people. So you both moved here and you didn't necessarily know anyone in the area. That can be quite challenging. To move to a new country or even just a new city to study at a new program. Where did each of you find support and find a community as students?

Thoko: 6:50

I was very fortunate that before I came here I actually met a Canadian who was living in my city in Malawi, and we met at a church. So he was, he works there, he has an NGO that he runs and had people coming to work with him from Canada, and there was a family that had worked with him who were not based in Waterloo. So coming in I already had a connection and that was in Waterloo. We also had a connection in Toronto. They had also worked with the same organization in Malawi. So my first two weeks of being in Canada I actually lived with that family in Wellesley while I was looking for accommodation and then, after I found my apartment, we moved in and then so continued with the theme of church connection and I found that my grounding grew stronger from having those connections.

Thoko: 7:56

But also on campus actually, once I started the program, there were other students from Africa or international students. So there was one particular colleague who was from Nigeria and she lived in Canada for many years, I think more than 15 years actually. So she was Canadian now and very experienced and really, really supported me in different ways as a friend, but also as somebody who could drive and if I needed a ride sometimes she provided that and yeah, so being on campus but also having and building a community outside of campus was really helpful, because I'm not gonna say it was easy. It was an easy transition because the expectations were high, but there were other limitations that sort of made that transition and settling period a bit challenging. But I did overcome them, definitely with help from the community and also new friends.

Meg: 8:59

Yeah, that's great. It's a good point. To build a community on campus and also outside of campus is, I'm sure, very helpful and a great example from you of having such an international campus. We have international students from all over, and so it's great for them to connect with each other and share their experiences. Margaret, did you have a similar experience to Thoko?

Margaret: 9:30

Not quite, so I did not know anyone in Waterloo At the time. My brother was actually in Toronto. So I reached out to my supervisor, particularly because I wanted to set my daughter up at the time she would be 18 months, so set her up family-wise. And so he connected me to another graduate, PhD student on campus, also from Nigeria, who had little kids, and so I was able to have exchanges with her while in Uganda around accommodation, around activities for my daughter. So she was very valuable and so in those conversations I decided to apply to the Graduate Family Housing at Columbia Village Lake and so through that was able to establish connections again to Thoko's point of campus, connections with all the families that were living in that community.

Margaret: 10:27

At the time my daughter was going to daycare and so I was very intentional about creating friendships there, because that becomes her little community that she gets to play with.

Margaret: 10:37

And then for myself, luckily we were in the Global Health Lab. So many of the folks in my lab were not originally from Canada, and so we were able to support each other in terms of our academic journey, but also in terms of what it means to settle into Canada. Build those connections, build networks that can help you succeed career-wise and also, of course, join the church, given that that's our background back home as well, and so building that spiritual community as well was very critical to our wellbeing, especially with the first winter. So, yeah, so they were absolutely excellent. And to Thoko's point, around the driving issue, I obviously couldn't drive when I first came and I didn't realize how horrible the winters were, and so I used to take the bus to take my daughter to daycare until the weather got pretty bad. And so, again, because of the connections we had built, I had friends who, until I got my driving license, pick us and drop us back and forth from her daycare, and that was very valuable at the time.

Meg: 11:45

Yeah, lots of different opportunities to build a community that you've both talked about. That's really great, so let's talk a little bit. I mean, you both spoke about fellow students that you met with, who both happened to be from Nigeria but who both came to Canada as international students as well. Really, that's connected to how the University of Waterloo African Alumni Association began as well, because it really started as an informal group for African graduate students to connect with one another. Can you tell me more about how that group came to be and how did it become an alumni group as well?

Margaret: 12:29

So the original group was an African Graduate Student Association, and it was started by students before at least I I think in Thoko as well had joined the University of Waterloo. So they had an existing WhatsApp group that had over 100 folks on there, and so that's how I came to know about that group. But through that group we realized there's a lot of turnover. Of course, graduate programs are quite short, so many students would come, complete their programs and move on to other endeavors. So we thought it would be helpful to establish an alumni community, one to keep those folks engaged.

Margaret: 13:11

But also because many graduate students were new to Canada, new to the context navigating a new employment system, and so needed that kind of tailored guidance and support in how to move your career as a student in different areas, how to simple things like buying a home in Canada right For those who wanted to stay, establishing themselves in Canada as well, right through immigration. So that's how the alumni group came to be. But also at the time we were going through the pandemic, a lot of individuals were feeling quite isolated and struggling with that process, and so we were able to bring in many of the African associations in Waterloo these are community based organizations to come through the Alumni Association and provide that community support, and that's how the association was built, and so, with the support of the University of Waterloo Graduate Student Association, we were able to formalize both the Graduate Association and the Alumni Association.

Meg: 14:23

Yeah, that's, that's great. Thoko, do you have anything else that you want to add about about the process or why it became an alumni association as well?

Thoko: 14:33

Sure, um. So Margaret is right that I was never part of that what's up group and um. So, after I finished my PhD program in 2018, I went out into the industry and other sectors, and then I returned to the university in 2020 to do a postdoc, um, and that's when I joined the global health lab that Margaret mentioned earlier, and then in that, in that group, you know, that's when I made the connections with people like Margaret and our colleague Christine and other people who were involved with the graduate student association for Africans primarily, and so, um, that's where I got the synergy and it was really exciting to be in conversations with Margaret and other people. They're really brilliant people and they came up with webinars that were open not just to graduate students but also alumni, and I had a privilege of attending a few of them and also leading our co-chairing the webinars, and we had guests from here in Canada, in Ontario, but also international guests from Africa who, you know, brought brilliant examples of how to make it out there after graduate studies. So it was really positive.

Thoko: 16:05

It was really good that I think that the energy from that also led us to, you know, think about people who are not, you know, currently on campus but, you know, could benefit and find value from connecting with an association that was for alumni. And so that's you know, from my perspective, how it started and how I got involved, joined the leadership team and just coming together to brainstorm to try to raise funding so that we could make this sustainable, and because the goal was not just something to get us through the pandemic, it was a brilliant, it was serendipitous again that we were able to have this community building, because it was really as long some and isolating during the pandemic, but we could meet online and, just you know, have fun but also, just you know, engage intellectually and socially. So, yeah, we did want to see something continue, even after we maybe left our leadership positions at the time, or so that's how I view it and, yeah, I just wanted to add to those point and around the mentorship beyond the pandemic, what had happened then?

Margaret: 17:36

At the time we also got requests from graduate students and undergraduate students who wanted mentorship, coaching, life coaching, that sort of support, and so we came up with the concept of it takes a village, where what we started to do is to map out organizations that engage with young people from similar background at the point of high school, because from interacting with our undergraduates we realized there was some barriers there into getting into a higher education undergraduate.

Margaret: 18:10

And so we partnered with an organization called Bring on the Sunshine in Waterloo that works with high schoolers predominantly of African descent, and we fed that organization into the University of Waterloo African Association, which is predominantly undergraduate students, and made that connection to the graduate community and then to the alumni to make sure that we are going full circle and ensuring that folks are supported from the time they do decide to come to Waterloo and, even if they don't, for some of the high schoolers, but all the way through undergrad, encouraging them to go to graduate school for those who are interested and then providing that mentorship and life coaching once you do graduate.

Meg: 18:56

Yeah, I mean you both bring up great points about how expansive communities like alumni communities can be. You know, for years alumni relations has supported a variety of location based alumni chapters we call them chapters and those are usually based in a particular city and they're all over the world, everywhere from Shanghai to, you know, silicon Valley or Vancouver. But. But more recently we've had more volunteer led programs that include support for alumni groups who have similar backgrounds or interests or experiences, and we call those affinity groups and the alumni. The African Alumni Association is a really great example of that, where it is for alumni who may still be close to campus, it's also for alumni who have gone back to Africa after completing their studies or somewhere else in the world after completing their studies, and it's also, as you pointed out, as you both pointed out, not just for alumni. Students can also benefit from the association and they can participate. So I wonder, I'd love to know more about both of your personal experiences getting involved. How has the association brought each of you value?

Margaret: 20:22

So for me, one is meeting amazing people and working with amazing people like Thoko and Christine and a couple of other colleagues that we have worked with in the past.

Margaret: 20:34

It's really coming together and identifying challenges or opportunities that we all have encountered as a group and then being part of creating an environment that's exclusive, where folks who as you said, students benefit because they come and find established structures that they can draw inspiration from, support from both professionally and not professionally as well. For me, it has brought me lifelong friendships. I've also learned a lot through the different journeys that many of our memberships have been able to have, and then, of course, opportunities like this to be on the podcast. Right, it's really because we were part of that association and the alumni office appreciated and supported what we're doing. Basically, it continues to surprise us by opening doors that we had never conceptualized. Right. So we came in with the goal to help our community, but that's also, in a way, working the other way and helping us in ways that we couldn't imagine. So it's really been a privilege and an honor to be part of this association, working with folks like To.

Meg: 21:50

Yeah, Thoko, what about you?

Thoko: 21:52

So I like to go back and for comparison. So when I first came in 2013, there weren't a lot of Black people around on campus, to be honest, and by the time I returned, you know, there was a big turnaround. And so meeting folks like Margaret and others who had been here that I would have not met, honestly, had it not been for the association, was very encouraging. People who are now working with the government or in research and then just, you know, seeing Margaret's journey actually she's very inspirational to me, like I am truly inspired by her, the way she excels in things that she does and even informing the association. She was really one of the driving forces behind establishing it. So I personally have been encouraged because to see people who look like me, with a similar background, excelling and unable to break down any walls real or perceived and then excelling and growing, it's really, really positive and I sincerely say that. You know it's been a great honor to have been involved, starting with the Global Health Lab and then the association itself, and to being here, as Margaret said, that it really has opened doors for us.

Thoko: 23:29

We were recently involved with UW initiative that invited former Black students, alumni and current students and and other people who are there in the industry, who are linked to the university in some way, to come together and just to celebrate excellence in the Black community.

Thoko: 23:53

And that was under the umbrella of being part of this association. And then we've been invited to be part of the Sankofa the summer. It's not summer school, but it's a summer program that will, you know, invite great 11 students to come and have a feel and an experience of what life could be like on campus, not just at UW but elsewhere. So we're also going to be involved with that and I know there'll be other opportunities in the future. So you know that adds value to in terms of my serving and giving back, but also, you know, in receiving, through engaging and associating with other people who do different things to me day to day. But we have a common thread and you know that is our, you know where, of African descent, and that's a unique thing in Canada, and we bring something to the table that's different.

Meg: 24:55

Yeah, it's always so great to have people on the podcast who have found a real sense of community and belonging in that community on campus and beyond, in the alumni community in general. I can really feel the difference that that it's made and the value that the association has made for both of you. So it's great to hear that you're expanding and working on experiences that include, you know, kids that aren't even in university yet. Even so, yeah, it's just so great to hear. So, look, if there is someone listening to this who is an African student at Waterloo or someone who has already graduated and they're thinking, wow, I didn't know that this existed. How can I get involved? What opportunities are there? Where could they start? How could they join?

Thoko: 25:58

Okay so we have on social media. We have an Instagram Instagram page, we have a Facebook page that they can follow and for those who are, you know, professionally inclined, we have a LinkedIn page as well that they could subscribe to and follow. We also have a subscription aspect to it, that you could become a member, like an actual member, and we can provide those links so that people can just you know, after the podcast go to them. But those are like, I think those are the primary points too Connect with us. But we also have a Gmail, like an association's Gmail address account that they could write to if they wanted to connect that way as well. Margaret, is there anything else?

Margaret: 26:46

Well, fortunately we are also now on the University of Waterloo alumni office in the affiliate groups, so I think that's also an easy way to find us and we are really appreciative to the alumni office again for sharing that our community exists for those who need to connect with us.

Meg: 27:09

Yeah, for sure, and we will put links. There are links to all of those things in the episode description. We can make sure to put those in. So if you are listening and you want to get involved, just go to that episode description and there are so many ways that you can figure out what's going on. Toko and Margaret, thank you so much for joining the podcast. It's been great to talk to you about your experiences and learn more about the African Alumni Association.

Thoko: 27:36

Thank you, Megan, it's been a great pleasure.

Margaret: 27:39

Yeah, thank you so much for this opportunity. It's been fun.

Meg: 27:46

Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow, like, subscribe, whatever your podcast player lets you do. In this episode we talked a lot about alumni chapters and groups. There are dozens of alumni-led groups offering community and support to Waterloo graduates who live in a particular location or share similar backgrounds and interests. Follow the link in this episode description to find the right alumni group for you you. Waterloo alumni podcasts are produced and hosted by me, Meg Vander Woude. I also happen to be a proud alum. Thanks to Davandra Earle for editing this episode.