CREDIT: FSU PUBLICATIONS AND COMMUNICATIONS DEPARTMENT.

When walking through the hallways at Fanshawe College you can almost guarantee that the faces you see do not all belong to one culture. Fanshawe College hosts thousands of international students that diversify its campuses. This is a great feature for students to have because of the opportunity to become familiarized with other cultures. With all of the international students that attend Fanshawe yearly, how is the college allowing them to embrace their own cultures?

Joseph Pazzano, the Director of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at Fanshawe College, said that he has been actively working on a variety of projects to promote diversity since he began his position in 2021.

“We launched our Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Anti-oppression Task Force last summer,” Pazzano said. “That’s a diverse cross-section of more than 30 students, faculty, and staff of diverse and professional experience.”


Additionally, Pazzano acknowledged that in the past year, the task force has been working on identifying barriers to advancement and have found a strategy that will be launched in Fall of this year.

“A lot of what we talk about in that strategy really focuses on increasing diversity and harnessing the power of the existing diversity that we already have,” Pazzano said.

Another project that Pazzano mentioned was the federal government’s 50-30 Challenge that Fanshawe has signed on to. According to Government of Canada, the 50-30 Challenge consists of two goals:

1. Gender parity (50 per cent women and/or non-binary people) on Canadian boards and/or in senior management

2. Significant representation (30 per cent) on Canadian boards and/or senior management of members of other equity-deserving groups, including those who identify as Racialized, Black, and/or People of colour (“Visible Minorities”), People with disabilities (including invisible and episodic disabilities), LGBTQ2S+ and/or gender and sexually diverse individuals, and Aboriginal and/or Indigenous Peoples.

“It’s one of my favorite projects because I think they’ve moved beyond talking about advocacy to actually taking action and literacy,” Pazzano said. Creating a sense of multiculturalism and belonging is also a priority to Pazzano and his team.

“There’s definitely been conversations about holding events and bringing folks together from different communities,” Pazzano said.

When it comes to how Fanshawe presents itself as a diversified community, he indicated that “it really provides as a model for how organizations can diversify in general.”

Students Syed Zaheer and Patricia Nguyen spoke about their feelings towards being an international student attending Fanshawe College.

Zaheer is from India and studies business analysis. Zaheer said he appreciates that he has been able to make friends from all over the world from being at Fanshawe and that he would love to see more events held by the college that would further encourage diversity.

Nguyen has been at Fanshawe for two years studying supply chain and accounting (post-graduate) and came from Vietnam. She believes that Fanshawe does enough to encourage diversity at the school by “organizing events and activities for international students” but did add that she would love to see more food outlets on campus selling Vietnamese and other international foods.

Whilst Fanshawe can be considered a well-diversified place, it is still growing with a mission to promote diversity for all.