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.