About Verena
About Verena
There are people who speak about connection. And there are people who create it in real time, in real rooms, with real stakes. Verena Rizg is the second kind.
What She Does
Verena founded the first BIPOC clinic in Canadian Armed Forces history — an initiative born from necessity, built through relentless advocacy, and recognized with the Deputy Minister's Excellence Award, the highest honour in National Defence.
She pioneered the Nurse Practitioner role across every federal prison in Nova Scotia. She has presented to some of the highest authorities in the Canadian Armed Forces — and to audiences well beyond Canadian borders.
She speaks, trains, and consults at the intersection of mental health, cultural responsiveness, and relational leadership — building capacity in healthcare systems, government institutions, military organizations, and leadership teams across Canada and internationally who understand that the hardest problems are always, at their core, human ones.
Who She Is
Verena is a Nurse Practitioner, systems strategist, spoken-word poet, and one of the most distinctive voices in her field on mental health, resilience, and what it actually costs to stay whole in systems that reward performance over presence.
She is Sudanese-Egyptian, Coptic, first-generation Canadian — raised between cultures, languages, and worlds that didn't always have language for each other. That upbringing didn't just shape her perspective. It became her clinical superpower.
She is a wife and mother of two daughters who remind her daily that the work of connection begins at home, and that raising loving humans is its own form of systems change.
She has spent 15 years doing clinical work in the rooms most people don't want to enter: military health services, federal prisons, migrant communities, underserved populations. She has sat across from people the system had already given up on. She has never once given up on them.
And then she walks onto stages and talks about what she found there.
She has a gift for holding the hardest conversations with grace — and for leaving the people in those conversations permanently changed.
This is not hustle. It is not strategy. It is not a framework she learned at a conference. It is who she is.
This is not a pitch. This is an introduction to someone you won't forget.
A Bio for Event Planners
Verena Rizg, MN, NP, is a Nurse Practitioner, systems strategist, spoken-word poet, and one of Canada's most distinctive voices on mental health, resilience, and what it actually means to show up fully human in spaces that weren't built for it.
She founded the first BIPOC clinic in Canadian Armed Forces history — earning the Deputy Minister's Excellence Award, the highest honour in National Defence — and pioneered the Nurse Practitioner role across every federal prison in Nova Scotia.
She has spent 15 years doing clinical work in the rooms most people don't want to talk about, and then walking onto stages to talk about them anyway.
She speaks on the tender subjects — resilience, joy, vulnerability, connection. The things people feel but rarely have language for. She has a gift for saying the thing nobody planned to hear — and making it the only thing people remember.
She moves people from insight to action. From inspiration to implementation. If you are looking for a speaker who will inform your audience — there are many. If you are looking for someone who will change them — there is Verena.
