Meet the Team
You Need This Box is Annand, Hania, Pachy, and Tamreen — a multidisciplinary team based in Edmonton, working across design, learning, facilitation, research, art, and community practice.
We came to this work through different lives, disciplines, cultures, and questions. What brings us together is a shared commitment to confronting racism honestly, humanely, and practically — not as an abstract issue, but as something that shapes everyday choices, systems, relationships, and ways of working.
For years, we’ve been gathering around one question:
How might we create better anti-racism interventions that acknowledge everyone’s humanity and create behaviour change?
Why interventions?
We use the word intervention intentionally.
An intervention gets in the middle of how things usually go. It interrupts a pattern, changes a flow, creates a pause, or makes another way forward possible. For us, anti-racism work cannot only live in conversation, intention, or awareness. It has to become something people can practice, test, repair, repeat, and carry into the places where harm is reproduced.
How we work
Acknowledging everyone’s humanity
We believe acknowledging everyone’s humanity does not mean avoiding hard truths.
It means refusing to use the same tools that created the problem to try to solve it. Racism depends on hierarchy, separation, denial, and dehumanization. Our work asks what becomes possible when we use a different set of tools: honesty, responsibility, relationship, care, imagination, and practice.
We are not interested in sorting people into simple categories of good or bad, racist or not racist, ready or not ready. We are interested in what people do once they recognize they are part of systems that cause harm — and how they begin choosing, relating, and acting differently.
Our way of working is playful, practical, and experimental. We make things, try them with people, learn from what happens, and keep moving.
Sometimes that looks like a learning series. Sometimes it looks like a workshop, object, event, conversation, prototype, or shared experiment. Whatever form it takes, the goal is not to perform certainty. The goal is to create conditions where people can face difficult truths, build capacity, and practice different ways of being together.