Raissa Amany

Raissa Amany is a social activist and public speaker, known for her work around youth engagement in health spaces. As a first-generation immigrant of Indonesian descent with multiple chronic illnesses, Raissa has personal experience with how health inequity affects marginalized populations. Advocating for the improvement of accessibility and equity within the pediatric healthcare sector, she currently serves as the Executive Director of the Young Canadians Roundtable on Health. In this role, she leads over 50 youth from across Canada in national child health advocacy, projects, and leads collaborations with prominent children’s organizations. 

Raissa is the co-author of the Children’s Book Project, speaking to children aged five to 10 about mental health resiliency. In her commitment to health equity, Raissa is also a research student with Our Kids’ Health, where she advises on youth engagement research guidelines and co-leads the Digital Health Youth Fellows Program. The fellows program teaches over 20 BIPOC youth the necessary skills to be health literacy champions and create evidence-based health promotion content tailored to their communities. 

In addition to her work in pediatrics, Raissa is a youth expert in child and youth mental health and addictions, currently serving on the Knowledge Institute for Child and Youth Mental Health and Addictions Youth Advisory Committee. She also currently serves on the Youth Advisory Council at Kids Help Phone, providing her lived and professional expertise. She also served on the inaugural working group for the first national standardization of Child and Youth Mental Health and Addictions with the Standards Council of Canada. With leadership experience extending beyond academia, Raissa is also a Youth Engagement Coordinator at Children First Canada. In this role, she designed and delivered the Young Canadians Parliament program, engaging over 150 young people nationwide in learning more about their rights. Raissa is currently pursuing an undergraduate degree in Health Sciences at the University of Ottawa and is an aspiring healthcare provider.

Head to the Top 25 main page to meet the rest of our 2024 Top 25 Women of Influence® Recipients.