In this episode of our 100 Years series, Esther Fagola and Gemima Cadet speak with Shayla Dube, a clinical social worker, educator and clinical supervisor who grew up with her grandparents in rural Zimbabwe and came to Canada in 2004. Shayla shares how social work chose her long before she had a name for it, shaped by a village where care, resources and responsibility were shared, and by a grandmother who was both a teacher and a community midwife.

Throughout the conversation, Shayla reflects on completing her BSW and MSW while raising two young children, her early years in child protection in Ontario, and her thirteen years in mental health. She speaks about leading with humanity, balancing the duty to report with the duty to care, and why the absence of racialized leadership in her career led her to create affinity-based supervision circles for Indigenous, Black, racially marginalized, East African and white clinicians.

This episode invites us to imagine the next hundred years of social work, one that moves beyond being anti-colonial to being truly decolonial, centres “nothing about us without us,” and treats mentorship, representation and identity as foundational to ethical practice.