Gilary is a Project Director at UPD. She is a human rights and equity educator and a strategist with over a decade of successful experience supporting school boards, advocacy organizations, labor unions, government agencies, and private enterprises through organizational change work that centers on human rights, equity, and inclusion. With roots in both the labor movement and the student movement, she specializes in human-centered program and policy design and evaluation, regularly conducting audits and organizational coaching and training on issues impacting marginalized communities. Gilary is driven by her own experiences as a Afro-Latina Muslim, and her practice is rooted, first and foremost in the community. She has a deep commitment to creating institutional and government policies and programming that are informed by the people that are impacted the most.

She holds an MS in Leadership and Community Engagement and a BS in Political Science from York University, Toronto, ON Canada. Her writing has been published in Until We are Free: Reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada and in Curriculum Inquiry, Volume 52, Issue 3, “Towards a Pedagogy of Solidarity.”