Doing good

The giving season, technically, starts in the weeks leading up to the holidays. For SFU alumni working in the social good sector, it runs year-round.

From offering immersive experiential learning opportunities to fostering passionate campus communities, SFU prepares its students for a lifetime of making social change. To catch a glimpse at how SFU students translate their campus experiences into careers dedicated to creating a more inclusive future, we caught up with three alumni: Erika De Torres, Apathy is Boring’s Director of Impact and Development; Jessica Pang-Parks, Crohn’s and Colitis Canada’s Director of Volunteer Engagement and Innovation; and Rian Bevan, Four Our Future’s Lead Innovation Researcher.

Erika De Torres remembers the moment clearly: it was 2004, she was 12 years old and, after watching a fateful news segment on television, she understood the kind of difference she wanted to make in the world.

Three young Canadians had recently launched Apathy is Boring to reverse the country’s trend of declining voter participation. Already an active volunteer at non-profits in North Vancouver, Erika tuned in when one of the organization’s co-founders was discussing the importance of getting youth to the polls in the 2004 federal election.

“I realized it was a really important mission in order for our democracy to function,” she says. “I had stars in my eyes.”

Erika deepened this interest at SFU through her coursework as a political science and gender, sexuality, and women’s studies double-major. She thoroughly followed her passion for community engagement outside of the classroom, too, taking on leadership roles with the Simon Fraser Student Society’s Women's Centre and the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Student Union, working as a campus tour guide and supporting other students in getting involved in campus life as a peer engagement educator.

Then, in another twist of fate, Erika moved to Montreal—Apathy is Boring’s home base—for graduate school. She didn’t know the organization was headquartered in the city until she attended one of their events with a friend. Later, Erika landed a job as Apathy is Boring’s director of impact and development, where she now conducts research, fundraising and evaluations to support their programming. She has continued her full-circle moment by chairing the SFU Alumni Association’s awards committee—it’s inspiring, she says, to see how many people’s journeys of making an impact started, just like hers, at SFU.

“My entire experience at SFU encouraged me to be an engaged person. It really prepared me for what I’m doing right now.”

Shortly after starting graduate school, Jessica Pang-Parks realized the laboratory wasn’t for her.

“Two weeks in, I was like ‘wow, I want to work with people, not algae,’” she recalls.

Jessica had recently moved to Ontario after graduating from SFU. She loved a lot of things about her undergrad: studying environmental science and biology, living and working on campus residences, talking with professors during class and office hours. The most logical step, Jessica figured, was to continue her studies at the graduate level. She realized, though, that the topics felt most alive for her while in conversation with other people.

As a result, she pivoted the focus of her thesis away from research and towards environmental education, eventually leading to her first post-grad job as a volunteer coordinator at World Wildlife Fund Canada. In November 2022, she became Crohn’s and Colitis Canada’s director of volunteer engagement and innovation. Currently, through listening to and collaborating with the organization’s community, she’s planning a new direction for the organization's volunteer engagement strategy. Volunteers are crucial in supporting the programming and fundraising efforts of the organization, such as Camp Got2Go for youth living with Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis and the more-than-60 annual Gutsy Walk events that local volunteers organize across the country. 

The work has a personal connection for Jessica, too. She was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis during her time at SFU. A professor was the one to encourage her to take a semester off to take care of herself—a caring gesture she feels driven to pay forward as an instructor herself, now teaching courses in volunteer management.

“I’m most proud of the moments in my career when I can make those meaningful connections.”

In Rian Bevan’s first years at SFU, he knew he wanted to study something that would help him do good in the world—he just liked too many subjects to pick one to major in.

Everything came into focus in his fourth year, however, when he enrolled in the Semester in Dialogue: a 10-credit interdisciplinary course that immerses students in conversations with faculty and local thought leaders. No two days in the course looked the same, running the gamut from learning about Indigenous drumming traditions to spending a day in discussion with Green Party leader Elizabeth May.

“It blew my mind open to what education could be,” Rian says.

The key to creating an equitable and sustainable future, he realized, isn’t necessarily tied to a single subject. As he learned in the Semester in Dialogue, real social change often begins with deep and critical conversations, and that real learning comes from experiences—like when he and his Semester in Dialogue classmates planned a 200-person event for their final project or when, in a social enterprise course, he conceptualized a platform that used blockchain technology to incentivize actions for social good.

The latter prepared Rian with the background knowledge necessary for his current role at Four Our Future, an Indigenous-owned company that develops business and economic development models grounded in traditional ways of knowing.

One of the projects Rian recently supported includes 400 Drums, a campaign that guided Indigenous artists in uploading their artwork as non-fungible tokens. Creating a stable record of the artwork on the blockchain, Rian says, can protect artists’ work from being appropriated and sold by non-Indigenous people. The impact also speaks to an intention he has formed through and beyond his time at SFU: to find work that is both fulfilling to himself and beneficial to others.

“I feel like whatever opportunities I take on should be aligned to that core.”