CMU adds faculty member to growing social work program
Dr. Felicia Owadara, Assistant Professor of Social Work
Canadian Mennonite University (CMU) continues to grow and enrich its Bachelor of Social Work degree program with the addition of Dr. Felicia Owadara, Assistant Professor of Social Work, who joined the faculty on July 1, 2025.
Owadara brings to CMU a particularly global breadth of experience and connections in teaching, research, and practical social work. She has studied in Nigeria (Master of Education from the University of Ibadan), England (Master of Research in Social Policy and Social Work Research from the University of York), and Canada (PhD in Social Work from the University of Manitoba). She has been a social worker in Nigeria's medical system, and she has worked on numerous international research projects.
Her research interests focus on mental health and inclusive policy design, particularly improving workplace environments for people who live with mental illness. "People ask why policy fails," she says. "Policy fails because those that matter, those that policy will impact, many of them are left out of the conversation." Her most recent contract studied how people with disabilities in Nigeria experience political marginalization and the implication for social work practice. The research findings are being used in grassroots advocacy in the region, and she hopes to publish her report this year.
When Owadara started her social work career on a hospital's psychiatric and neuroscience unit, it felt like the work she was called to do—in part because of her personal connection to that area of the field. When she was a child, a family member suffered significantly from mental illness, leading to upheaval within her family and resulting in him leaving to live with other family. When she asked her parents questions about the situation, she was met with silence—no answers, no discussion.
Working in the hospital many years later, she had the opportunity to participate in a system of collaborative, holistic health support. Social workers, nutritionists, psychiatrists, and other specialists met monthly to share ideas and opinions, and to provide services for clients all in one place. It gave her hope for how mental health could be treated, with care and openness. "The journey of mental health is not a journey that we can walk alone. If we want to find a solution, we show up on the journey together," she says.
Owadara has volunteered with Peer Connections Manitoba, formerly the Manitoba Schizophrenia Society, and engages in multicultural support and community building with African Communities of Manitoba Inc.
At CMU, she teaches classes on trauma-informed social work practice, research methods, decolonization in social work, and immigration, newcomers, and refugees. She was previously a sessional instructor at the University of Manitoba, where she taught topics like interpersonal communication and social welfare policy. In her teaching, she values the mutual exchange of learning between students and professor: "For me, the classroom, I've always seen it as a dual process. Students come to learn, you learn from them."