By Sanzida Habib
CMCCF Vancouver Peace-First CollaborationNet Connector
January 2026
Abstract
This reflective account by Sanzida Habib documents the Vancouver Cultural Community Peace-Building Hub hosted under CMCCF’s Peace-First: CollaborationNet initiative in January 2026. Bringing together participants from Afghan, Baluch, Bahai, Bengali, Indigenous, Caribbean and other diverse backgrounds, the dialogues explored the meaning of positive peace beyond the absence of war. Participants connected inner harmony, trauma healing, family relationships, leadership practices, decolonization, and access to justice as interconnected dimensions of peace. Through lived experiences of migration, activism, armed conflict, and settlement, contributors articulated peace as balance, within oneself, within families, within communities, and with land and nature. The conversations highlighted the role of trust, equity, cultural traditions, spiritual practices, and human security in sustaining peaceful societies. The Hub revealed peace not as a static outcome, but as an ongoing circular process of restoring coherence and connection across personal, relational, and systemic levels
Introduction from CMCCF
The Vancouver Cultural Community Peace-Building Hub is part of CMCCF’s growing Peace-First: CollaborationNet initiative, a pan-Canadian, cultural community-led peacebuilding network rooted in Manitoba and expanding nationally. Through local Hubs in cities such as Winnipeg, Thompson, Brandon, Portage la Prairie, Vancouver, and Toronto, the network creates intentional spaces where diverse cultural communities can reflect on the meaning of positive peace in their own lived realities. These gatherings are not conferences or policy briefings; they are relational dialogues designed to surface wisdom, lived experience, and culturally grounded practices that contribute to sustainable peace at individual, family, community, and systemic levels.
The Vancouver Hub, convened by Sanzida Habib, represents the early emergence of this national ecosystem of connection. Each Hub contributes local insight while strengthening a broader web of relationships across regions. Together, these conversations form a living knowledge network. It is one that honors Indigenous teachings, immigrant experiences, youth leadership, and intergenerational dialogue. What follows is Sanzida’s reflective account of what unfolded in Vancouver and what was learned from community members seeking positive peace.
Opening Reflection
Peace is the alignment of mind, body and soul. It is about restoring harmony and coherence within and around us. (A participant)
The Vancouver Peace Hub: Gathering Voices
It was a great honor to organize and facilitate the first Vancouver Cultural Community Peace Building Hub on behalf of CMCCF, now Peace First, on January 17, 2026. This was followed by a virtual Hub over Zoom on the 24th. In both in-person and online sessions, a total of thirteen participants, five male and eight female, took part and represented the Afghan, Baluch, Bahai, Bengali and Indigenous communities. The Bahai came from Iran while the Baluch members came from Iran and Pakistan, and the Bengalis were from Bangladesh and India. There was one participant from Trinidad and Tobago who felt like belonging to multiple communities due to unique upbringing in a diverse family setting. The highest number of participants came from Afghanistan, and they added different dimensions to the dialogues due to their direct experience with armed conflicts. They all came to Canada relatively recently looking for positive peace. One of them was an ex-parliament member and others had vibrant professional, personal and family lives they had to leave behind. One of them is currently working as a social worker in Canada. The Baluch members had a long history of activism to defend human rights and sovereignty in their community.
Creating a Safe and Welcoming Space
As a facilitator, my goal was to ensure a warm and safe space for the diverse community members to re/connect with each other and share wisdom and ideas about peace building. My job was to ask questions, listen to the different voices and take as much detailed notes as possible. The in-person meeting allowed us a better opportunity to show welcoming body language, share snacks and refreshments, sit around a table to have face to face interactions which were missed in the virtual setting. In both sessions, everyone came with deep interest to engage and share experience and insight, and a curious mind to learn from each other while taking a step forward towards peace building.
A Personal Awakening to Positive Peace
Personally, and professionally, I’ve worked as a facilitator trained in effective communication, trust building and conflict resolution, to some extent. I have worked with many racialized and vulnerable populations in community organizations, but rarely have I engaged in conversations about peace or peace building. I have attended workshops on stress management, trauma, healing and selfcare both as a participant and a facilitator. But I was hardly aware of the concept of inner peace and building positive peace, especially in relation to internal harmony and healing from trauma. I often felt alarmed and confused by the fact that humans have produced and used guns, weapons and nuclear bombs to ensure “peace” on earth! I considered myself as an education activist and a community advocate for equity and social justice, but I never thought those activities might have some connections with positive peace. I was happily surprised that all the participants in both groups were well ahead of me in conceptualizing positive peace and inner peace, and in linking those with activisms for equity, social justice and mental health and wellbeing. I had a moment of epiphany. Everything is indeed connected in the natural and social worlds!
Defining Positive Peace: Community Voices
One intuitive participant really encapsulated the central notion when she said, “No war doesn’t mean there’s peace. Real peace in the community means individuals can live without fear … In a peaceful community, everybody can get support to live, get equal access to education and work, and have decision making power.” I witnessed rich conversations about positive peace understood from a holistic perspective that can be gained through healing from hurts, imbalances and traumatic experiences, and built through interconnectedness based on mutual trust and love in the community. Peace is so multidimensional that it’s hard to separate personal from the community, family, state and universal elements. On the one hand, peace seems to be intermittent and interrupted by the speed and demands of modern life as well as the negativity and noise of the world affairs and injustices, amplified by social media. On the other hand, peace can be viewed as a state of mind or awareness that can be felt through meditation or slowing down and spending time in nature, and through deeper spiritual awakening. Such inner calmness is then translated into peaceful interactions and communications in families, communities and wider spaces.
Trauma, Survival, and Healing
For someone who has been subjected to armed violence and war, “Peace literary means life, living and lifesaving elements like oxygen and water; it’s the reality of staying alive and enjoying freedom.” For many Afghan immigrants, peace means reunion of family member, rebuilding a new life and successful settlement through learning English and having equal access to education and employment in Canada. The Indigenous leader reminded us of the history of colonization, displacement and trauma created by the colonizing systems. We, the racialized immigrants, are also complicit in the process but share many common experiences of trauma. We can learn and commit to positive peace from the resilience and healing practices of all Indigenous cultures including our own traditions before they had been displaced by some forms of colonization and westernization. Trauma can be our teacher, as our Indigenous guru suggested, “We need to notice the imbalance created by trauma, harm and pain and transform those into inner peace.” This was resonated by the Afghan youth leader: “Trauma is what we haven’t discovered about ourselves, our hidden abilities and power to heal.”
The hurt and pain we carry inside often translates into anger, guilt and self-loathing, and expressed through violence and aggression. We can channel those negative energy through sweating activities like yoga, sauna, martial arts, and through creative processes such as, poetry, music, films and theatre etc. The idea is to stop blaming or acting like a victim and rather exercise agency and accountability to learn the “art of living” and “restore balance.” Understanding the neurobiology of our brain and mind is important to control anxiety and enhance peace within oneself. As one attendee said, “Our brain has the ability to increase suffering so it’s important to control our anxiety.”
Decolonizing Peace: Land, Nature, and Responsibility
We need to be self-reflective, control our own mindset and examine our presumptions and prejudices that create racism, sexism, patriarchy, gender and other biases. We also need to be mindful of our power, privilege and responsibility to create space and mechanisms to uplift the less privileged and vulnerable beings, including other animals in nature and even nature itself: “The sun, rivers, mountains, other animals should be considered as part of the whole picture. Just human perspectives and human rights issue make us arrogant that humans are the most intelligent animals who can control nature,” said the Indigenous leader. He continued explaining that colonization has created isolation and devalued women’s roles in caring and teaching young children the values of love and care because such skills are considered lower and hence, remain underpaid or unpaid. Thus, we need to decolonize our minds and perspectives, systems and policies to reclaim our humanness and the natural harmonious state of humans to feel connected with land, nature, neighbors, other people and animals.
Peace in Families and Leadership
Many other community members reiterated this by drawing on open parenting and positive leadership in families and communities. Everyone agreed that gender binaries, hierarchies and stereotypes are not conducive to a peaceful family environment. Family relationships need to be based on love, mutual respect and equal access to resources to fulfill everyone’s needs, even the non-earning members. Parenting must be free from fear and conditions and also nurture love and trust that connect, join and unify all family members. Similarly, organizational and community leaderships must practice love, kindness, compassion and empathy. Positive leadership is about identifying our strengths and finding opportunities for us to grow. Thus, equity and justice must start from families and diffuse in communities and organizations locally, nationally and globally.
Dialogue, Power, and Mechanisms for Connection
Although it’s in human nature to want to have power to control others and dismiss disagreements and different ideas, peace requires us that we respect and value different ideas and opinions by keeping an open mind and building connections with people around us. We need to create tools and mechanisms to facilitate open dialogues with people from all walks of life with diverse language and cultural backgrounds and different levels of power or privilege. We need to speak and listen to each other, share books, songs, videos to gain and exchange more knowledge and understanding about the cultural and other differences we have in different communities.
Peace as a Circular Process
In conclusion, I learned from our learned community members that peace is not a packaged product or end goal to be achieved forever; it is a circular process of re/establishing balance and harmony starting from an individual level and spreading it around, from local to global arenas. Individual, cultural and family practices such as, self-reflecting, cultivating hope, building trust, ensuring time to connect with each other, eating together and sharing meals are important for peace. Healing traditions like smudging, drumming, singing and dancing are equally important. Spiritual practices can give us freedom from material and worldly objects; they can help us avoid greed and fear, make us feel free, peaceful, and connected with nature and natural wealth – the oceans, trees, mountains. As a result, we can decolonize ourselves by upholding the Indigenous knowledge and belief systems that view everything in nature as interconnected. “We have to harness the oneness and the connections we all share rather than isolation created by the systems of colonization and patriarchy,” uttered a wise voice in the room.
Thus, we need more resources and support to be human and nurture the human strengths of being compassionate, collaborative, loving, caring and resilient rather than focus on aggression, greed and other negative traits. The government’s job is to create policies and programs that will allow and support us to keep all the helpful traditional and cultural practices alive. There exists language, cultural, economic and other barriers to hinder our access to resources and opportunities. Our rights to equity and justice, and responsibilities to protect nature and its wealth need to be reflected in social, economic and organizational structures and policies. The media also needs to play more positive roles. Municipal, provincial and federal governments should focus on human security to enable all individuals and families to have equal access to resources and support needed to live a peaceful life.
Appreciation
I am so deeply grateful to all the contributors who participated and engaged enthusiastically in the positive peace conversations. I felt enriched with a deeper understanding of positive peace through facilitating the sessions. The two-hour sessions disappeared in a flash, and most of us left with a hunger for more opportunities to reconnect and to carry on similar dialogues in near future, despite some language barrier. One member said, “We need conversations like this to bring people from different cultures and faiths to build connections and peace.” I thank CMCCF (Peace First) for entrusting me with this honor. I received special thanks from some participants for inviting an Indigenous leader to the table, and I’d like to end this piece with his insightful guidance:
“Keep loving, keep peace in your heart and keep your surroundings peaceful; reach out and build connections and stand beside each other when someone is need of help and support.”
About Sanzida Habib
I am an independent scholar and honorary Research Associate at the UBC Center for India and South Asia Research. I am also a woman (pronouns: she and her) of color in Canada, a community educator and activist passionate about social justice and decolonizing practices. I received PhD in Women’s and Gender Studies from UBC and worked in several SFU and UBC research projects on South Asian and other racialized immigrant women’s experiences of migration, settlement, health and wellbeing. I have also worked in many community organizations both as a service provider and a board member. I enjoy organizing and performing in cultural programs for a multilingual and multicultural audience. I am truly grateful to the Host Nations and Indigenous communities of the Coast Salish territories for welcoming us, uninvited immigrants and settlers, and for sharing the abundance of this beautiful land they have taken care of for time immemorial. I aspire to work with fellow immigrant and indigenous women and their families to empower each other, to create a more welcoming, inclusive, and equitable society be it through research, writing, community work, or performing arts.
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