Peer Support & Admin Coordinator

Alessia Servin (she/they)

avppeersupport [at] uvss [dot] ca

Role: Offering support to those accessing AVP’s Peer Support services and overseeing administrative tasks to enhance AVP’s operations and assist staff members.

Background: Alessia is a queer, neurodivergent, Mexican-Canadian artist, activist, and support worker with a deep love for community care. Alessia has a MA of gender, sexuality, and women’s studies and has over nine years of peer support experience. She also brings with her over two years of non-profit leadership experience to AVP.

Values: They are passionate about ensuring that survivors feel safe, heard, and valued when attending peer support spaces. She centers her peer support to remind survivors of their power and autonomy using harm reduction and trauma informed practices and holding space for compassionate care.

Operations Coordinator

Felicity D’Souza (she/her)

avpoperations [at] uvss [dot] ca

Role: Overseeing AVP’s day-to-day operations and supporting members (staff, work study students, volunteers) who help run the organization and its programming within their role.

Background: Felicity is a queer, second-generation Canadian from the traditional territories of the peoples of the Treaty 7 region of southern Alberta, with Goan and British ancestry. She holds a BSc in Forest Biology and Environmental Studies and a BA in English Communications. Felicity has worked and volunteered in roles supporting survivors of sexualized violence, women in addiction recovery, and immigrant women navigating systemic and cultural barriers. Her experience spans advocacy, community-based care, and peer support, and she brings a trauma-informed, survivor-centred, and intersectional approach to her work. Informed by her own lived experiences, Felicity is committed to creating spaces that are safe, empowering, and rooted in connection, care, and mutual support. 

Values: She understands healing from violence as relational and interconnected, emerging through our connections to the land, the natural world, and one another. She values the grounding and restorative role that nature can play in supporting survivors, and recognizes that safety, care, and healing are built collectively within community. Her work prioritizes mutual aid and community care, centring survivor autonomy, connection, and collective resilience within a living, interconnected world. 

Education and Outreach Coordinator

Paloma Shah (she/her)

avpeducation [at] uvss [dot] ca

Role: Overseeing educational programming for the Anti-Violence Project

Background: Paloma is a cisgender woman and a fourth-year undergraduate student completing a BSc in Psychology and a minor in Business at the University of Victoria, with a focus on social psychology and mental health and well-being. She is a third-culture child who was born in Thailand to Indian parents and has lived across multiple cultural contexts before moving to Canada for her undergraduate degree. These experiences have shaped her understanding of belonging, identity, and community care, and inform her approach to working with diverse student populations. 

Throughout her time at UVic, Paloma has held multiple roles supporting students from a wide range of backgrounds, including international, first-year, and mature students. Through these experiences, she has developed a strong interest in education and community-based support, as well as the importance of creating spaces that feel approachable and welcoming. She is particularly interested in ways education and conversation can help people better understand themselves and others.  

Her involvement as a research assistant in psychology research allows her to engage with current research on human behavior and mental health, strengthening her ability to approach education and outreach in an informed and reflective way. 

Values: Paloma’s work is grounded in the belief that education and open conversation are essential to building safer and more supportive communities. She approaches education and outreach through a trauma-informed and survivor-centered perspective and values creating learning environments where people feel comfortable engaging in dialogue and asking questions without fear of judgment.  

Paloma believes in meeting people where they are and understands that individuals bring different cultural perspectives, experiences, and comfort levels into conversations about consent and relationships. Growing up across cultures has shown her that there is no single way that people understand these topics, and she values creating spaces where participants feel respected and able to engage in ways that feel meaningful to them. 

Education Coordinator – Men’s Programming

Carl Haynes (he/him)

avpmensed [at] uvss [dot] ca

Role: Overseeing educational programming for the Anti-Violence Project, coordinating and facilitating the Men’s Circle at UVic.

Background: Carl is a cis gender, neurodivergent man with British and Australian immigrant parents. Carl has lived with anxiety and depression for over a decade. Through his undergrad, he had a front seat to friends perpetrating and experiencing sexualized violence. As he supported survivors, he learned about the important role men need to play in violence prevention. In 2023, he began volunteering with the Anti-Violence Project to help bring conversations on gender, intimacy, and sexualized violence to masculine audiences on campus. Carl is now pursuing a Master’s of Counselling so that he can have a lifelong career in the helping profession and bring a background of sexualized violence prevention and support to his counselling work. Outside of work, Carl has 2 cats, too many chickens, and a darling wife, Julia. Julia is currently recovering from post-concussion syndrome and chronic migraines and has been housebound and disabled for over two years.

Values: A core value in Carl’s work is joint liberation. He believes we must view the work of liberation as one where we are all deeply connected to one another and the earth. He is passionate about the intersection of violence prevention and personal and community well-being, and how dominant forms of masculinity impact men’s propensity to enact violence upon themselves and others. Carl believes in the inherent goodness within all people and sees his work with men unpacking masculinity as a journey inwards towards their authentic and good selves. Carl sees community building and joy as an essential parts of the work.

Work Study Students

Role: Assisting with organizing, coordinating, and growing the Men’s Circle while working on programming and other community-building projects related to AVP goals with a focus on men’s health.

James (he/him)

Background: James is a cisgender male in his third year as an undergraduate student in Psychology at UVIC. He brings his lived experience of dealing with men’s issues to his position at AVP. He has a passion and desire to bring awareness, compassion, and education to others, which led him to this position. Following completion of his undergraduate degree, James is looking to apply to graduate programs to pursue a career in counseling. In his free time, he enjoys running on dirt trails and watching Arsenal win every week.

Values: He grounds his work in the understanding that every person is different and has different lived experiences. While also acknowledging that people share a common humanity, for him, this means that what one person struggles with, often others do as well. With this perspective, he seeks to make people feel seen and attempt to find a connection with others who may feel isolated.

Jasmine (she/her)

Background: Jasmine is a cisgender settler of Turkish and French descent. She is a second-year undergraduate student studying psychology at UVic, and holds a BA in Political Science from Concordia University. Jasmine brings her years of experience working and volunteering in community-focused non-profit organizations to her work with AVP. She also volunteers with the Peer Support Centre on campus, and co-facilitated the Art for the Heart support group this Fall semester. She hopes to pursue a career in mental health care and advocacy as a school psychotherapist.

Values: She believes that we all have something to learn from one another by virtue of our individual experiences, and that listening, sharing, and collaborating provide a meaningful pathway to connection and healing. She grounds her work in a spirit of curiosity and compassion, and holds a deep appreciation for the resilience that can be found in vulnerability. She has firsthand experience supporting individuals as they navigate care resources and is committed to working collaboratively to identify the most appropriate support in line with each person’s needs and preferences.