World Refugee Day 2026

Dr. Lisa Ruth Brunner is a Research Associate at the University of British Columbia Centre for Migration Studies and a Public Policy Consultant with the Affiliation of Multicultural Societies and Service Agencies of British Columbia (AMSSA). She studies education and migration, particularly international student mobility, the role of educational institutions as migration and refugee resettlement actors, and citizenship education within settler-colonial states. She has been a Regulated Canadian Immigration Consultant since 2014 and has over a decade of professional experience as a university international student advisor.

M. Yanni Nicolidakis-Mustafa is a lawyer at Edelmann and Co. with experience in immigration, refugee, human rights, criminal, and constitutional law. He joined the firm in 2025 after clerking at the Court of Appeal for British Columbia and articling with the Community Legal Assistance Society. He represents clients in immigration detention, refugee claims, and other complex immigration matters before the Immigration and Refugee Board and the Federal Court. With Palestinian and Greek roots, Yanni provides compassionate, trauma-informed advocacy for migrants and other vulnerable people seeking safety and stability in Canada. Currently, he is specifically focused on the challenges surrounding Bill C-12.

Saleem Spindari is a former refugee and a person with a passion for social justice. Saleem has been active in advocating for refugees, immigrants, migrant workers and other marginalized groups. Saleem has presented and continues to present on refugee and migrant worker issues at conferences and forums. He addressed the Senate’s Committee on Human Rights and the House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Health about the resettlement of refugees and services for vulnerable groups. Saleem has also sat on various working groups, committees and boards at the municipal, provincial and federal levels. Saleem previously worked as the Senior Manager of Refugees and Migrant Worker Programs at MOSAIC and as the Manager of the ASPIRE Program, a case management and counselling program at the Muslim Food Bank and Community Services Society. Saleem was also the co-chair of MAP. Saleem is a Regulated Canadian Immigration Consultant and is the owner of Spindari Immigration Consulting Services.

Dr. Evelyn Encalada Grez is a transnational labour scholar and community labour organizer committed to critical sociology and decolonial theories of knowledge production that centre diverse ways of knowing and precarious workers’ experiences at the margins of the global economy. She is the co-founder of the award-winning collective, Justice for Migrant Workers (J4MW, which has advocated for the rights of migrant farmworkers in Canada for two decades. Her research bridges grass-roots activism with academic scholarship, and through this approach, Dr. Encalada Grez has extensively documented the lives of Mexican migrant farmworker women who work and forge transnational livelihoods between rural Canada and rural Mexico.

As a public sociologist, Dr. Encalada Grez has mobilized her research through various media, such as documentaries, and given talks in venues such as Parliament Hill, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and at the United Nations in New York. She has also worked transnationally with export-processing workers in Mexico and Central America and as lead travelling faculty teaching US university students in over 6 countries. For three semesters, she was also the Academic Director of an intensive social justice study abroad program in her city of birth, Valparaiso, Chile. Dr. Encalada Grez is driven by her immigrant working-class experiences and committed to decolonializing and transformative pedagogies.