Reez Community Foundation (Reez) is a community development organization committed to building inclusive communities and fullfilled individuals through addressing social, legal and health based inequities.
Our strategic focus is on supporting and enhancing the functioning of individuals and families of African descent, Indigenous Canadians and other vulnerable populations includin newcomers and immigrants. We pay particular attention to the Social Determinants of Health status and the priorities of the UN International Decade of Peoples of African Descent 2015-2024.
Our work includes focusing on collaboratively and innovatively enhancing personal choice, providing transition support, sharing promising practices, building system capacity and fostering policy development. We contribute to the following SDGs: 1, 3, 4, 5, 10, 11 & 17.
Ufuoma Odebala manages her community-informed health and wellbeing practice through Reez Community Foundation. A non-profit she co-founded with her family in 2019. Ufuoma is a parent of four boys from her marraige of 29 years. Parenting and motherhood has and continue to have profound effects in shaping Ufuoma’s life and work as a woman of African Descent.
Ufuoma practices as a Registered Social Worker in Alberta and NWT. She adopts an Ubuntu and decolonizing recovery-oriented practice approach with a focus on self-healing and psychological safety in varied community spaces such as within homes, schools, and workplaces. Her areas of interests include systems induced stressors, public legal and mental health education, access to justice and other issues of social determinants of mental health amongst communities of African Descent and those similarly situated. As a sociolegal practitioner, educator, and researcher she enjoys knowledge acquisition and use.
“… you’re not gonna win anything by fighting existing reality. You just need to build an alternative system that renders the existing one obsolete.”
Pia Mancini, CBC July 23, 2019