Lerato Chondoma
Associate Vice-President, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion & Anti-Racism, Acadia University
Lerato hails from the Batuang Clan of ba ha Moletsane from Lesotho in Southern Africa and lives as an uninvited guest on ancestral and unceded Mi’kmaw territory.
She is the inaugural associate vice-president of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion (EDI) and Anti-Racism at Acadia University and provides strategic leadership for the university’s EDI, anti-racism and accessibility programming and initiatives. Lerato works to understand how policy, systems, and procedures can enable mutuality in community-university collaborations and address issues of racism, justice and equity on individual and system-wide levels.
Her praxis focuses on decoloniality, intersectional equity, anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism. Lerato is also interested in exploring new approaches that recognise and centre different knowledge systems, how these are evaluated in our public institutions, and how they are reflected in policy considerations.
Outside of academia, Lerato serves as a member of the Board Executive for the Canadian Black Policy Network and as a Board member of MEOPAR (Marine Environmental Observation Prediction & Response network), an independent not-for-profit that funds research, trains students, mobilises knowledge and forms partnerships in the area of marine risk and resilience. Lerato formerly served as vice-chair for the Racial and Ethno-Cultural Equity Advisory Committee that advises Vancouver City Council, and while at the University of British Columbia, served as Chair of the Blackness Committee on UBC’s Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence Task Force and as staff lead for the inaugural Forum of the Scarborough Charter on Anti-Black Racism and Black Inclusion in Canadian Higher Education.
Lerato is an employment equity lawyer, having previously practiced in Lesotho and South Africa. She has a B.Com and an LL.B from Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa and an MBA from the Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University.