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Busayo Disu is a pharmacist turned intercultural communication advocate. She’s launched the African Society of Strathcona County, written a children's book called Our Story, Our Voice, produced a documentary of the same name, and is organizing community dialogues between policymakers and immigrant families.
In her episode, Busayo and I chat about:
How she's building community dialogues between policymakers and immigrant families
How her children's struggles pushed her into community building
What Canadians can do to welcome newcomers
Why she thinks immigrant parents need to get involved in building the society their kids are going to grow up in
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Some takeaways:
The gap between policy and practice is where immigrants get lost in the workplace. Organizations will say they have a diversity and inclusion policy. But what are the actual steps? How is feedback received across cultural lines? Are there strategies for intercultural communication, or just a document filed away somewhere?
"Passionate" can be a compliment or a code word, and the difference depends entirely on who's saying it. Busayo went to multiple job interviews where interviewers told her she was "so passionate." She later found out that it was polite Canadian for "you're too much." In Nigeria, it's okay to be passionate and direct. In a Canadian professional setting, it can be seen as aggression. This is one of those invisible cultural translation problems that no settlement guide covers. I think the fix is for both sides to understand that communication styles are culturally coded, and different doesn't mean wrong.
Integration requires infrastructure that most communities don't have yet. And we immigrants need to do the work of building that connective tissue. Don't wait, stretch out your hand and kick off the conversation. Sometimes you'll get a handshake, sometimes you won't. And that's okay.
The most effective immigrant advocates I've spoken to on this podcast don't wait for permission. Busayo got county funding for her book. She got the mayor to write the foreword. She got it into schools by aligning it with the Alberta curriculum. She's organizing a community dialogue in the council chambers with policymakers, MLAs, school principals, and religious leaders. She's the first Black member of the library board. All these happened because she showed up and made the case. That's how societies change.
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