Shahnaz Qayumi, M.A. Developmental Psychology & Pedagogy, is a faculty of the Early Childhood Education department at Langara College. She also received her master’s Certificate from the Harvard Program Global Mental Health: Trauma and Recovery (2014). She has taught Early Childhood Education at Native Education College, Kwantlen University College, and Vancouver Community College. She has facilitated an ECE (Early Childhood Education) program for Family Empowerment funded by the Ministry of Health in North Delta for low-income families. She has also been a member of the Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Awareness Committee, Vancouver Women’s Visible Minority, and a Mentor in Leadership Roles in the Canadian Society/National Organization of Immigrant and Visible Minority Women of Canada. For seven years, she led Afghan community programming called “Caravan” TV” and chaired the Afghan Cultural Heritage Day in Vancouver in 2011.

In 2012, she became the Chief Operating Officer of Partnership Afghanistan Canada. She assumed responsibility for building the Center of Excellence for Innovation and Research for the Faculty of Psychology and Education at Kabul University. Partnership Afghanistan (Canada) has partnered with the Science and Technology Faculty at the University of British Columbia (2012) to utilize an innovative software called LIVES (Learning through Interactive Voice Educational Services) in a project called M-Learning, designed to reach Afghan parents and teach them to assess and evaluate the progress of their child’s on different aspects of the various stages of early childhood development such as the physical, cognitive, language, social, and emotional development. The project was implemented in the summer of 2012, and the results were significant. PAC partnered with World Vision Afghanistan in 2017, and LIVES was used to improve literacy among women in Herat, Ghor, and Bodghuis in remote areas. The next project is Education for Deprived Children of Afghanistan via technology. The needs assessment of this project was completed in 2019, and implementation is on hold due to the new Taliban government, which banned education for girls. Shahnaz writes for children and expresses the diversity of human rights, the magic of giving, and the challenges of escaping her original home out of necessity in children’s books “Like You and Me,” “Afsana Seesanna,”” “Run Away from Home Like a Gingerbread Man, and “Zia’s Story.”(Published 2024).