28 Sep Vanessa Lesperance – Projects Liaison

Vanessa Lesperance is a mixed heritage Red River Metis woman who is originally from Treaty 1 territory (Winnipeg, MB) but now resides on Coast Salish territory. She earned a graduate degree in business from SFU and has a masters in leadership from Royal Roads University. The focus of her masters research was on decolonizing business through workplace spirituality.

Vanessa has over 11 years of corporate experience working in various roles running sales and operations teams. Since leaving the corporate world she founded The Mindful Managers and Vancity Labyrinth offering decolonial facilitation, relational leadership and team building workshops. She is also an instructor at the Justice Institute teaching leadership and power and privilege and spent the past few years as the LIFT Circle lead with the Indigenous LIFT Collective – creating an online community of Indigenous women entrepreneurs and running entrepreneurial & leadership programs and services, including the podcast Circles of Matriarchy, and co-developing a micro course on Decolonizing Business offered by Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. She’s been published in SAY Magazine, Liisbeth Magazine and the World Federation Association of Teacher’s Education journal. Vanessa has a passion for people, decolonizing business and working towards economic reconciliation to ensure we can all rise and thrive.

For fun she loves salsa (eating and dancing), reading and playing board games.