Meet our 2025-2026 Board members!
Brigid Portner – Chair
Brigid has been a member of the Foolish Operations Board of Directors since its inception in2011 and currently serves as Chair. She first became connected with Julie Lebel a decade ago when, as a new mother, she brought her 3-month-old to a Dancing the Parenting class. Brigid and her (now two) children were part of the DTP weekly ensemble throughout their early years. When she is not volunteering or growing with her family, Brigid supports research at Simon Fraser University. As the Research Grants and Projects Coordinator in the Linguistics Department, she administers grant funding, enables student opportunities, assists with proposals, supports alliances, and organizes special events. She especially loves building partnerships, visioning for the future, and charting a path to success.
Originally from Ottawa, Brigid (née MacAulay) has lived in Vancouver since 2004. She is a former professional dance artist and trained at Canada’s National Ballet School, School of Toronto Dance Theatre, and Dancetheatre David Earle. She has had the privilege of working with choreographers Peggy Baker, David Earle, James Kudelka, and Molissa Fenley; as well as with contemporaries Julie Lebel, Julia Carr, Janet Johnson, Lindsay Zier-Vogel, and Susan Kendal Urbach, among others. She has a background in sustainability, program management, writing, and editing.
Ingrid Broussillon -Vice-Chair
Once upon a time, a baby girl was born in Guadeloupe, a French island far, far away in the Caribbean.cWhile growing up she loved listening to storytelling and she would read the same tales over and over.cBut tales and storytelling would not make a living for her (at least that is what she had been told). Then she moved to France to complete her studies in Business Management, got a job and started to live an adult life. Something was missing, and she knew it was the joy that she used to find in the books she read or the storytelling she listened to. As soon as she could, she took acting and storytelling classes alongside her day job. In 2017 she decided that she wanted to be fluent in English, so she moved to Vancouver. Living there, she realized that Vancouverites would love to speak French, while she would love to speak English herself. She realized that due to her accent, it would be very difficult for her to pursue her passion for acting and storytelling. So she decided she would overcome this obstacle and create her own opportunities. Late in 2018 she created Griottes Polyglottes a business where adults and kids can master French by using their entire body and emotions.Her dream is to provide a place for everyone to speak several languages while having fun and being creative.
Miriam Esquitín – Treasurer
Miriam Esquitín is both the Director of CityStudio Vancouver and the Finance Manager of the organization. As Director, Miriam takes a strategic commitment to developing, implementing and evaluating programming that truly advances the needs and priorities of our partners City of Vancouver, UBC, SFU, Langara College, and BCIT. She is guided by the curiosity of the multiple ways of collaboration, learning, and innovation between our civic leaders and youth to address Vancouver’s pressing issues. She has had this role since summer 2020.
As Finance Manager, she takes care of the entire cycle of finances, from budgeting to controls, processing and reports, as well as policies and procedures. Passionate about social change, she studied both her BA and MA in Social Anthropology and proceeded to work locally and internationally in education, sustainability, agriculture, economic development, and justice system reform. She has a thing for understanding, strategic relationships, evaluation, numbers and processes. She moved to Canada in 2003 from Mexico, first to live in Edmonton and in Vancouver since 2010.
As an immigrant, Miriam recognizes there are privileges she enjoys from a history of colonialism, more so working at the intersection of two settler power institutions, so individually and through her work she is committed to decolonization learning and transformation. Miriam is also a dancer, an innovator in contemporary ensemble improvisation. With a great partner, she launched Polymer Dance in 2012, a community-based troupe that promotes dance for everybody and dance for everywhere.
Astrid Pedneault – Secretary – vacancy
Sadly, Astrid passed away suddenly on February 4 2026.
Astrid had over thirty years of teaching experience as a kindergarten teacher and she was also a Faculty Associate in the Teacher Education Program at Simon Fraser University. In her thesis “Moving towards children: A life narrative of learning from and with children” she examines and discusses different viewpoints in teaching with a focus on how children learn with their whole being and through play. She addresses the vulnerability and creativity of children and the role that teachers play in empowering them. She emphasizes the need to provide specialized guidance for student teachers at the start of their teaching journey.
To read our tribute, visit : https://foolishoperations.org/2026/02/astrid-pedneault-memorial-tribute/
Adriana Contreras – Director at Large
Adriana is a bilingual graphic recorder, illustrator, and designer (English/Spanish). As a visual practitioner, her role is to listen deeply, help make connections, capture information, tell stories and communicate ideas. Through her work, Adriana has supported projects in the fields of migrant justice, racial equity, cultural safety, health, education, among others. Adriana was born in Bogotá, Colombia and immigrated to Canada, with her family in 1998, at the age of fifteen. She completed her BFA at SFU School for the Contemporary Arts in 2006 and has worked and volunteered with numerous Arts, Culture and Community organizations for 20 years.
Abeer Yusuf – Director at Large
Abeer Yusuf (Sher/her/elle) currently works at the City of Vancouver as a social planner in the Social Policy department and comes from a background of journalism, community development, communications and philanthropy spanning more than a decade. Abeer migrated to unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh lands 11 years ago as an international student to pursue her second Masters in journalism. Her body of academic work includes examining identity and belonging, the intersectionality of race and culture, and learning about how we belong (or don’t) in places and spaces.
Abeer has grown up around the world, and has incredibly rotten luck when it comes to many things, but at least that makes her life both weird and wonderful – and helps her approach her life with a sense of schadenfreude adventures, which makes for great party conversation. Her lifelong interests include living and learning about different models of decoloniality, authentically building connections and community, reading and friendship. Abeer lives in the Milky Way galaxy between Vancouver and the Internet, is deathly petrified of writing bios, and some of her personal passions include telling and listening to stories, beating Google Maps’ walking estimates, gushing about moments of serendipity and eating chicken biryani and mangoes (separately). She also passionately hates Excel spreadsheets, and has never gotten a manicure before.
Olga Rojas – Director at Large (and Treasurer in training)
Olga is a detail-oriented Accountant with a Master’s degree in Business Administration, a Bachelor’s in Accounting and Financial Sciences, and a Diploma in IFRS, with over 10 years of progressive experience in accounting, financial reporting, internal controls, and regulatory compliance. She is proficient in financial statement analysis, risk assessment, and SOX compliance, with command of ISO 9001 and COSO internal control frameworks. Olga is bilingual and skilled in fostering collaboration across departments and delivering accurate financial insights that support business decisions.