ABOUT VERENA
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. I am the second kind.
There are people who speak about connection.
Others create it — in real time, when it matters most.
I am the second kind.
I’m Verena. A clinician, a systems strategist, a spoken-word poet, and the author of The Cost of Capable™. My work lives where leadership, medicine, and human connection meet, in the place most care stops short of.
The system is built to treat the symptom and move on. I built my career on the question it skips. Why does a body arrive already braced? What has it been carrying that no one asked about? And once you can see that, where does a person actually go from here?
We treat this as an isolated mental health problem when the body has been carrying it all along. So much of what wears us down is physical, and it traces back to things we were taught never to question. That belonging is earned. That performance is safety. That rest is a luxury. We carry the cost in our bodies and call it normal. I don’t. My work creates space for people to finally feel what they have spent a lifetime avoiding.
I founded the first BIPOC-focused clinic in Canadian Armed Forces history, for which I received the Deputy Minister’s Excellence Award in 2024, the highest honour the Deputy Minister of National Defence confers. I built it inside one of the most hierarchical institutions in the country, with no playbook and no precedent. I have since trained hundreds of clinicians and providers across systems, and my work now informs training and reform at a national level.
I am 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 just shape my perspective.
It became my clinical superpower.
My work is grounded in over sixteen years of clinical practice, across occupational medicine, acute care, federal corrections, and migrant health. These are environments where the stakes are high and the margins are thin. They shaped what I notice and what I refuse to look past.
Human connection is an art and a science, and most systems are built as though it has to be one or the other. My work lives in the integration, and that is where real change becomes possible. For over a decade I have spoken and facilitated for organizations across the country, from corporate leadership rooms to healthcare authorities and mission-driven teams. Wherever I am, the focus holds: what is actually happening beneath the surface of a room, and what it would take to change it.
Twenty years as a spoken-word poet shapes how I communicate and how I make space for conversations people have never been given permission to have. Medicine taught me precision. Poetry gave me everything precision leaves out.
The Cost of Capable™ came out of all of it. A clinical framework that names a structural condition the system has no language for, the predictable cost of being the one who holds it together. It asks the question medicine skips, and it offers a way forward, in language that moves people from insight to action.
My family, my husband and our two daughters, is my greatest calling and my greatest teacher. They shape how I understand care, and what it means to build a life, and a body of work, with fierce intentionality.
The work, two ways in.
