About Us - Not In My Colour

Not In My

Colour

is an anti-oppression and equity advocacy centre that began as a beauty blog in 2008 for women of darker skin tones to find makeup in Canada, before expanding into fashion commentary.

However, in 2012, a young, unarmed, Black boy named Trayvon Martin was shot in Florida and then in 2014, Mike Brown was shot by a police officer. Those two incidents ignited a community who has long suffered from racism of a system not designed to see them as equal. It also inspired us to begin advocating for equity within a system that didn’t offer marginalized communities a fair shot.

In 2017, founder of Not In My Colour, Erica Ifill, used her knowledge of digital media and combined it with her activism to create the Bad + Bitchy Podcast. The weekly podcast provides critical analysis of politics and pop culture from an intersectional feminist perspective. It was nominated for “Best Podcast in Ottawa” by Faces magazine and is one of the only political podcasts that centres marginalized voices in Canada.

Not satisfied with just a podcast, Erica took her perspective mainstream and infused the Canadian media landscape with her writing and radio and television appearances, maintaining her position as one of two Black women in mainstream Canadian political writing and commentary. As an economist with 14+ years of federal government experience, Erica uses her training to produce in-depth political and policy analyses in her weekly Hill Times column (reposted in our In the Press section) to advocate for marginalized communities. Her other published writing includes: The National Observer, The Globe and Mail, Press Progress, Refinery29, Chatelaine and Maclean’s; she has appeared on The Current, CPAC, CBC News, CTV News and CBC Radio One.

Informed by over a decade of developed expertise, her professional experience and her proven analyses, Erica started Not In My Colour to provide the training and support necessary to guide you towards your organization’s equity goals. For us, this journey is a rewarding and necessaryone to build bridges beyond the status quo.

Our services are intended to develop a path forward, customized to each organization’s starting point and goals. Therefore, we offer everything from conversation starters to deep analysis. We also support your organization’s communications, when you don’t know what to say or how to say it. In essence, Not In My Colour is a consulting agency that that takes organizations from meaningful conversations to systemic change. We will always advise you to do the right thing, not the most convenient thing,