One suitcase, two children, and a city that became home.
Alasoba Kelsy-Braide came to Orillia in 2017 as an international student with two young children and almost nothing else. Nine years later she is one of the city’s best known community builders, and a candidate for city council in Ward 3.
She did not wait to be invited.
Alasoba arrived in Orillia in 2017 with two children and one suitcase. Within four years, she’d turned a small online group into the Orillia and Area Black Community Association (OABCA). Through OABCA, she has organized community festivals, galas, and a support network open to families and everyone. Nobody appointed her to do any of it — she simply saw a need and met it.
She enrolled in the Child and Youth Care program at Georgian College’s Orillia campus and graduated with the class of 2020, raising two children in a country where she began knowing nobody. A few kind people helped her find her footing in those first months, and she has never stopped repaying it.
While studying she was elected Vice President of Community Engagement for the Georgian College Students’ Association, where she organized the Orillia campus’s first Black History Awareness Week. Today OABCA runs festivals and galas, connects newcomer families to resources, and gives people a room where they are not the only one. It was built with volunteers, potlucks and phone calls, not budgets.
That’s the habit she’d bring to council: see the gap, develop the solution, and see it through — even when the work isn’t glamorous.
Nine years, in order.
Leaves Nigeria for Canada as an international student with her two children, and enrols in Child and Youth Care at Georgian College’s Orillia campus.
Graduates with the class of 2020. As elected Vice President of Community Engagement for the students’ association, organizes the Orillia campus’s first Black History Awareness Week.
Founds the Orillia and Area Black Community Association, which grows from an online group into a countywide network of families, events and support.
Receives the County of Simcoe Community Champion Award at the tenth annual Newcomer Recognition Awards, and helps found Orillia’s equity, diversity and inclusion development group.
Runs for city councillor in Ward 3, taking the same approach to city hall that she took to community building: show up, ask the question, follow through.
The work behind the campaign.
The festivals are the visible part. The rest of her time has gone into front line care and boardroom work: she has worked as a support worker with Empower Simcoe, served as a director on the board of Making Change, a non profit led by Black women, helped found Orillia’s equity, diversity and inclusion development group, and volunteered at Calvary Pentecostal Tabernacle.
It is unglamorous experience, and it is exactly the kind council needs. Knowing how a service actually reaches a family is different from reading about it in a staff report.
- Founder, Orillia and Area Black Community Association
- Support worker, Empower Simcoe
- Board director, Making Change
- Co-founder, Orillia EDI development group
- Former Vice President of Community Engagement, Georgian College Students' Association
Why council, and why now.
Because the decisions that shape Ward 3, what gets built, what gets fixed, what gets funded, are made in a room she has spent nine years standing outside of. She would rather be inside it, asking the questions residents actually ask her at the grocery store.