Immigrant Women Beyond the Box | Asma Alwahsh: She Once Considered Leaving Canada. Now She’s Running for Waterloo City Council

Immigrant Women Beyond the Box | Asma Alwahsh: She Once Considered Leaving Canada. Now She’s Running for Waterloo City Council

When Asma Alwahsh arrived in Canada in 2012, there were moments when she wondered whether she had made the right decision. She felt lost, her confidence had been shaken, and returning to Jordan crossed her mind more than once. Fourteen years later, she is asking residents of Waterloo’s Ward 2 to elect her to City Council.

The distance between those two moments tells a larger story, one of a newcomer who turned her own struggle to belong into years of community service and an organization that now supports women and families across Waterloo Region.

Alwahsh’s earliest years in Canada were shaped by the uncertainty familiar to many newcomers: understanding a new system, rebuilding professional confidence and finding a place in a community that still felt unfamiliar. In a 2014 account of her immigration experience, she described feeling “lost and confused” after arriving and acknowledged that she considered returning to Jordan several times.

Instead, she chose to stay and begin building connections around her.

Volunteering became one of the first turning points. Through the Volunteer Action Centre and organizations including Immigration Partnership, Alwahsh began learning how local institutions worked while building relationships within the community.

Those connections eventually led to professional opportunities in employment services and newcomer settlement support, placing her directly alongside immigrants navigating housing, employment, health care, education and other challenges of starting over in Canada.

But over time, she began to recognize her own early experience in the lives of other women.

Arab women she encountered were dealing with isolation, language barriers, difficulty finding work and uncertainty about where to turn for information or services. For some, the challenge was not simply adapting to a new country, but finding a sense of independence and belonging within it.

That need became the starting point for what would later grow into the Canadian Arab Women’s Association, or CAWA.

In 2016, Alwahsh started with something modest: a community group that brought women together for weekly gatherings, supported by United Way and the Kitchener Waterloo Community Foundation.

It was not yet a large organization with multiple programs. It was a place to meet, ask questions, find resources and connect with others who understood the experience of building a new life.

Two years later, the initiative became a registered non-profit organization and eventually evolved into CAWA.

The organization grew with the needs of the community. CAWA says it now serves thousands of women and families across Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge and Guelph, offering programs connected to settlement, employment, entrepreneurship, education, health, family support, professional development and community participation.

What began as a response to isolation gradually developed into a broader effort to help women gain access to information, opportunities and the confidence to participate more fully in Canadian society.

Alwahsh continued developing her own skills alongside the organization. Her professional background includes training in volunteer management, leadership and non-profit management, while her published biography also notes continued studies related to community development.

She also participated in leadership training with the Aga Khan Foundation Canada as her work increasingly involved partnerships across community organizations, public institutions, schools and service providers.

Her work has received wider recognition. In 2025, Alwahsh was nominated for Waterloo Region’s Women of the Year award in the Community Service category. The nomination highlighted her role as CAWA’s founder and executive director and the organization’s work supporting Arab women across differences in immigration status, age, income and religious background.

The next chapter takes her into a different arena.

On May 1, 2026, the first day nominations opened for Ontario’s municipal elections, Alwahsh filed her papers to run for Waterloo City Council in Ward 2. Her name appears on the City of Waterloo’s official list of candidates for the October 26 municipal election.

Her campaign now draws on many of the issues she encountered through years of community work. Among the priorities identified on her campaign platform are neighbourhood infrastructure, community safety, economic growth, local services and representation for residents across Ward 2.

Those proposals are now part of an electoral contest in which voters will ultimately decide who represents them at City Hall.

Yet Alwahsh’s story did not begin with politics, and it cannot be reduced to an election campaign.

It began with a newcomer questioning whether she could build a life in Canada at all. What followed was a gradual process of learning the system, volunteering, working with other newcomers and eventually creating an organization around needs she had first understood personally.

Fourteen years ago, Asma Alwahsh was asking herself whether Canada could truly become home.

Today, she is seeking a place at the table where decisions about that home are made.

The October election will determine whether her journey enters a new political chapter. But the transformation already completed, from wondering whether to stay to seeking a role in shaping the city where she stayed, is a story in its own right.