LubunTO Community Education and Engagement Project
Asya Gunduz
Toronto, Ontario
Her motivation was straightforward: newcomers deserved tools rooted in lived experience, not scattered links or informal chats. Many community members were navigating housing precarity, employment struggles, complex health systems, and immigration steps at once. Asya saw an opportunity to turn informal knowledge into something practical, accessible, and empowering.
A Year of Building Pathways to Belonging
Asya Gunduz is the board chair and co-founder of LubunTO and has spent years building spaces where LGBTQ+ newcomers from Turkey and Kurdistan can feel understood, supported, and connected. Drawing on her background in community organizing and policy work, she led the LubunTO Community Education and Engagement Project—a year-long initiative to create a multilingual, culturally specific resource to ease the settlement process for queer and trans migrants.
The project increased trust, visibility, and navigation capacity. Participants named feeling “seen” as queer migrants.
The project set out to build a “living” Resource Kit translated into Turkish and Kurmanji and grounded in the real pathways community members take to access care. Asya and the collective combined focus groups, consultations with sector professionals, participatory research, and creative programming to shape the final product. Milestones included peer-led navigation sessions on housing and health, multilingual workshops, and targeted outreach at events such as Toronto Pride, Abolitionist Pride, and sector gatherings like Trans Day of Visibility. Each activity fed into the kit’s design, ensuring the content reflected real needs, real barriers, and real solutions.
The impact was immediate. Participants described feeling “seen” as queer migrants through reflections of culturally familiar spaces, repeated touchpoints, and trusted facilitators in their own languages. They left sessions with more precise steps to access IFHP or OHIP, gender-affirming care, legal aid, safer housing, and employment supports. Throughout the process, the team learned how diverse LubunTO’s base is—divided by language, immigration status, and need—yet united by a desire for practical, verified information and peer support. Trust deepened when referrals included real names and contacts, and when the same supportive faces returned month after month. Partnerships also grew. LubunTO collaborated with the Queer Muslim Network on a Ramadan iftar, connected with legal and health allies, and strengthened ties with ASO partners. These relationships now live inside the finalized kit as warm, reliable referral pathways.
Although it was a year of success, Asya still faced challenges common to volunteer-led initiatives. Capacity, emotional heaviness, and community fatigue were challenges Asya navigated by pacing work, delegating roles, and using trauma-informed facilitation to balance heavy topics with creative or celebratory moments.
The most sustainable moves were simple—shared scripts, short checklists, and publishing drafts instead of waiting for perfect outputs.
Looking ahead, LubunTO is preparing to publish and distribute the multilingual Resource Kit both in print and online, supported by their recently launched website, www.lubunto.ca. The collective plans to establish a governance process to keep the kit current and run workshops that use it as a teaching tool. Asya imagines a Toronto where queer and trans newcomers from Turkey and Kurdistan can access services without starting from zero—where supportive housing, affirming care, and decent work are within reach. She hopes to mentor peer educators, deepen cross-sector partnerships, and continue to shape services based on community knowledge.
About Asya Gunduz
Asya Gunduz serves as the board chair and co-founder of LubunTO, a volunteer-driven nonprofit dedicated to supporting LGBTQ+ newcomers from Turkey and Kurdistan through community education, resource building, and mutual aid. With a background in community organizing and policy work, Asya guided a year-long collaborative effort to develop a multilingual, culturally specific settlement Resource Kit and a series of engagement activities designed to strengthen self-advocacy, improve access to services, and foster belonging among queer and trans migrants.
Instagram: @lubun.to
LinkedIn: Asya Gündüz
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