Rising 2025: Acadia’s Associate Vice-President, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism Lerato Chondoma participates in a national conference as a member of the Board Executive for the Canadian Black Policy Network.
Meet Lerato Chondoma, Associate VP:
Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism
Maximizing opportunities for historically, persistently, or systemically marginalized populations
By Laura Churchill Duke (’98)
Lerato Chondoma
Lerato Chondoma is a proud Mosotho woman raised in the Batuang Clan ba ha Moletsane from Lesotho in Southern Africa. She is the eldest daughter, a sister, and a single mother by choice of two boys.
“I walk with my ancestors and carry my people, my family and my children everywhere I go, into every room that I step,” Lerato says.
Her worldview, she explains, is intrinsically rooted in Ubuntu/Botho – a concept in African philosophy encompassing the deep understanding that we are all interconnected and that I am because you are and because we all are. These principles guide Lerato in her work as Acadia’s Associate Vice-President, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism. “In the university context, EDI requires the creation of opportunities for historically, persistently, or systemically marginalized populations of students, faculty and staff,” she explains. This is something she knows well and has experienced personally. Lerato attended school in South Africa during apartheid as an international Black student. This was her first violent encounter with systemic, institutionalized racism and the first time society told her that her Blackness was her identity. As a university student, she experienced other violent encounters, including being beaten by a group of Afrikaans boys during orientation week. This racism was not just in South Africa. As a high school student, Lerato lived abroad, in Perth, Australia, during the time when Cathy Freeman, an Australian Aboriginal athlete who competed in the 1996 Summer Olympics, experienced racism. Racist commentary unfairly existed in the country, Lerato says, even though Freeman was representing Australia at the highest level and was one of the best in the world at the time. “I recall thinking, I am going to do something about racism and inequity when I grow up. I never want people to feel ashamed, isolated, sad or dehumanized as I have, or perhaps Cathy Freeman did even after winning a silver medal at the ’96 Olympics,” she says.
“I walk with my ancestors and carry my people, my family and my children everywhere I go, into every room that I step,” Lerato says.
Career grounded in advocacy
It was a culmination of these experiences that led Lerato to build a career grounded in advocacy for equity and equality, beginning as an attorney in South Africa specializing in employment equity and labour law. In both her career and life choices, she says she seeks to find ways to dismantle structures of systemic racism, inequity and colonization such as the ones in which she grew up. What she discovered was that education is an equalizer for so many people from equity-deserving groups. Today, she is fulfilling her lifetime goal of being in a leadership position that supports these types of journeys and stories. As an academic practitioner, Lerato is interested in thinking about the design and questions that need to be asked of ourselves and of the system for equity, decolonization and anti-racism. She chose Acadia because she fell in love with the Annapolis Valley, and wanted to live where she could raise her two biracial sons in a tight-knit community with potential for kin relationships. Professionally at Acadia, Lerato says she has been especially energized to create opportunities for co-development of solutions, interventions and knowledge exchange shaped by Indigenous and Black community perspectives and experiences.
“I have also lived and witnessed the transformative and life-changing impact of university participation in Indigenous sovereignty and social justice issues,” she says.
Another key initiative is looking at Acadia’s staff and faculty representation. “A lot of our student composition is made of students from racialized communities and increasingly from other equity-deserving groups, so a lot of our EDI efforts are to diversify staff and faculty representation as well as work on our systems to be more inclusive to support the diverse population groups,” she says. Other EDI work on campus includes the creation of an institutional accessibility plan that was revealed at the end of May. The plan involves hiring a part-time accessibility coordinator, establishing a hub of resources, organizing a symposium for 2026, and developing guidelines and toolkits for best practices around accessibility. Beyond this, Lerato says she will host listening sessions with queer collective communities at Acadia as well as with female and non-binary leaders on campus, and racialized (other than Black) students, staff, and faculty regarding their experiences. The aim is to identify gaps, barriers, and opportunities to support integrative mental health on campus, in addition to EDI and race-related concerns. Alumni can play a role in this, too, especially with accountability, she notes. “Alumni need to keep us committed to honest, transparent dialogue and reporting. Moving forward, we know the power of history and different timelines of knowledge and collective institutional memory,” Lerato says. She is also working on adding alumni seats to EDI-AR related committees and looks forward to reaching out to alumni to ask them to serve, contribute and participate in the co-creation of this work. At a time when EDI is deeply misunderstood, and living in a pluralistic and multicultural Canada, she asks, “how can anything else be truer than EDI at the centre of what it means to be Canadian? Diversity is our superpower in Canada. Inclusion is the work of all Canadians, and it starts at home.”