Reez Community Foundation (Reez) is a community development organization with a mandate to blend and unify human diversities by promoting healing and empowerment … and to promote changes in attitudes, beliefs and social norms. We are committed to empowering families and strengthening communities by centering lived experiences.
Our strategic focus is on supporting and enhancing the functioning of individuals and families of African descent, Indigenous Canadians and other vulnerable populations including newcomers and immigrants. We pay particular attention to the Social Determinants of Health status and the priorities of Justice, Recognition and Development of Peoples of African Descent advanced by the first and second United Nations’ Decades 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.
Parenting and motherhood has and continue to have profound effects in shaping Ufuoma’s life and work as a woman of African Descent. She founded Reez Community Foundation (Reez) in September 2019 with a mandate committed to empowering families and strengthening communities by centering lived experiences. She is a Registered Social Worker with a Restricted Authorization and a legal professional on track to be a Student-at-Law from March 2026. Her overall social work practice framework includes taking a family systems perspective in making professional judgments that shapes assessments and interventions.
Her mission is to help clients thrive through deepening understanding of self while reducing life threatening, therapy-interfering, and quality of life interfering behaviours to become skillful in sustaining healing, recovery and resolving relational challenges. 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