About

A project never changed the world. Self-reliance is self-sufficiency economically….And taking your own decisions…managing your own affairs. ….just having more income does not make you more concerned about other people. You have to organize around certain values – late, lovely Ela Bhatt, SEWA

We may say that we serve and are at the service of community or some such, but even that needs to be liberated. Serving needs to be liberated from any hierarchy- neither charity nor servitude nor obligation….not even a hint or whiff. Serve piko a piko (belly button to belly button), all a he also (face to face), until we cannot tell who serves whom and we are served.- Roshi Norma Wong

The fingers of people are not all the same length – A. Ol’oiloisolo Massek and J.O. Sidai, Maasai proverb

Only what is really oneself has the power to heal. – Carl Jung

What would it mean if we could find a way to be together that didn’t rest on agreement. – Adam Philips

Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. – Edward Abbey

Always be passionately aware that you could be completely wrong. -Dian Marino

I am Nanci, a Chinese-Syrian poet, adult educator and strategist from Halifax, Nova Scotia, K’jipuktuk, unceded unsurrendered ancestral homelands of the M’ikmaq. Originally from Port Colborne, Ontario, my family and ancestors are spread wide.

If I graduated from high school today I wouldn’t be able to afford to go to university. This has made highly attuned to class issues and passionate about equity, fairness, especially around money, education and assets.

For years, I worked to bring connections between voice, choice and bodily safety especially for women and girls including a peer coaching and consulting group for over a decade and close to that amount of time at Coady Institute. This work led to support cooperatives, coalition-building, alternative economic models, community land trusts, organizational governance, strategy support, gender, equity, and anti-racism work. This brought me to address the ownership of larger and larger assets including reparative land justice. I still facilitate and provide strategic support part time to organizations and collectives.

Taking a leadership role at Tatamagouche Centre, a justice and spiritual oriented retreat centre from 2020-2024 deepened my commitment to justice grounded in spirit and what it truly means to Right Relations. Tatamagouche Centre is now in a sacred process of Repatriating the land and governance to Women of First Light, an Indigenous women’s charity. Committed to continuing to support them as a friend and Treaty person. You could too. Take an audio tour of Tatamagouche Centre’s Land Walk to learn more about Tata’s long journey of love, harm, repair and Righting relations that continues. Apology like reparations is a verb.

Have also Re-certified to be a personal trainer, having first been one in the Eighties. Yes, leg warmers and high impact. I consider myself a movement coach focused on strength, mobility, hormone balancing and wellness especially for those with barriers, conditions and at transition points in their lives.

A poet, I believe deeply in sharing our stories, dialogue and meaning-making. These are key to changing norms and narratives, healing but also just connecting and seeing one another. Published “Hsin” in 2022 and it won the JM Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award.

About half of my time, I rest, get outside, drop down into spirit practices such as sitting, paddling, poetry, IChing. Sing in two choirs. Try to make sense out of all of this and what we are being called to. And sometimes I just play.