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Verena Rizg, Canadian keynote speaker and nurse practitioner — health equity advocate and founder of the first BIPOC-focused clinic in Canadian Armed Forces history

ABOUT VERENA

The Clinician.
The Poet.
The Bridge Between Medicine
and the Art of Human Connection.

The Clinician.
The Poet.
The Bridge Between Medicine
and Human Connection.

There are people who speak about connection. And there are people who create it — in real time, in real rooms, when the stakes are real. Verena is the second kind.

There are people who speak about connection.
Others create it — in real time, when it matters most.
Verena is the second kind.

About Verena

Verena is a Nurse Practitioner, systems strategist, and spoken-word poet whose work sits at the intersection of leadership, medicine, and human connection — helping people and organizations build healthier relationships with themselves, each other, and the systems they move through.

Her work addresses the problems organizations feel but often struggle to name: the breakdowns in communication, trust, culture, and care that quietly shape performance, retention, leadership, and well-being.

Verena Rizg, nurse practitioner and keynote speaker specializing in health equity, cultural safety, and human connection

She has a gift for helping people who might otherwise misunderstand each other find their way to one another.

She creates the conditions for people to feel, name, and face what they have often spent a lifetime carefully avoiding.

Verena is Sudanese-Egyptian, Coptic, and first-generation Canadian — raised between cultures, languages, and worlds that did not always have language for one another. That upbringing did not simply shape her perspective.

It became her clinical superpower.

Verena’s work is grounded in over 15 years of clinical practice across occupational medicine, acute care, community health, federal corrections, and migrant health.

She has worked in environments where the stakes are high, the margins are thin, and the cost of getting it wrong is real. That experience shapes how she sees, what she questions, and what she refuses to overlook.

Verena Rizg professional headshot — keynote speaker on leadership, culture, and compassionate care

Human connection is both an art and a science. Most systems are built as though it must be one or the other. Verena’s work lives in the integration — and it is in that space that meaningful change becomes possible.

She founded the first BIPOC-focused clinic in Canadian Armed Forces history.

She has spent over 15 years working inside complex systems and high-consequence environments, navigating the kinds of institutional spaces where trust, leadership, culture, and care carry real weight. That vantage point is not separate from her work. It is what gives her work its depth, clarity, and edge.

Built inside one of the most hierarchical institutions in Canada — with no playbook and no precedent — her work is now informing training and system change at a national level, well beyond where it began. It has been presented to senior military leadership nationally, received the Deputy Minister’s Excellence Award in 2024, and led to Verena training hundreds of leaders and clinicians across the country.

She is the bridge between rooms that seldom understand each other — and the one you will remember, not because she performs expertise, but because she brings the kind of clarity that can only come from having done the work inside those rooms.

For over a decade, Verena has spoken and facilitated for organizations across the country — from corporate teams and senior leadership rooms to healthcare authorities, public institutions, and mission-driven organizations.

Whether she is on a stage, advising leadership, or working alongside a team, her focus remains the same: helping people understand what is actually happening beneath the surface — and what it would take to change it.

Verena Rizg, nurse practitioner and mental health advocate — founder of the first BIPOC-focused primary care clinic in Canadian military history

Her work is also shaped by more than 20 years as a spoken word poet and storyteller — a practice that informs how she communicates, how she connects, and how she creates space for conversations many people have never been given permission to have.

Her voice moves between clinical insight, lived experience, and relational depth — because the problems she works on do not belong to just one field.

The work is not only about what people know. It is about how they show up, how they lead, how they belong, how they connect, and how they humanize themselves and each other.

Her family — her husband and their two daughters — is her greatest calling and her greatest teacher, shaping how she understands care, responsibility, and what it means to build lives — and systems — with fierce intentionality.

Verena Rizg laughing — keynote speaker known for warmth, authenticity, and spoken word

Ready to bring Verena to your next event?

Keynotes, workshops, leadership sessions, clinical training, and consulting — for organizations across corporate, healthcare, public, and nonprofit sectors, nationally and internationally.

Book Verena to Speak →

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A Bio for Event Planners

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Verena Rizg

Verena Rizg is a Nurse Practitioner, speaker, spoken word poet, and systems strategist whose work sits at the intersection of leadership, medicine, and human connection.

With over 15 years of clinical experience across acute care, federal corrections, migrant health, and other high-consequence environments, she brings a rare ability to translate complex human dynamics into clear, actionable insight.

She is the founder of the first BIPOC-focused clinic in Canadian Armed Forces history. What began as a single initiative has since informed training and system change at a national level, with presentations delivered to senior military leadership nationally and its influence extending beyond the CAF to organizations across Canada.

Known for her ability to name what others miss, Verena helps organizations understand the hidden dynamics shaping trust, culture, communication, and performance — and what it takes to shift them.

Her work is grounded in a core belief: that human connection is both an art and a science, and that the strongest leaders and healthiest systems know how to hold both.

Her greatest calling is her family. A wife and mother of two daughters, she believes that how we love at home is inseparable from how we lead everywhere else.