Aphrodite Bouikidis

Aphrodite Bouikidis is Program Coordinator for CityStudio Vancouver and an urban resilience specialist.
She has 15 years of experience managing programs and building partnerships and ecosystems around urban resilience, social innovation, civil society and diaspora engagement in Canada, Europe, United States and Middle East. She has served as an expert practitioner in urban policy programs with city leaders and experts from cities in the U.S. and Europe and is currently an advisor and board member for Ecogenia, an organization that is building a youth climate action corps in Greece.

Since moving to Canada in 2019, Aphrodite worked as a consultant on disaster and climate risk and resilience projects in the province of British Columbia and completed a Master of Urban Studies at Simon Fraser University. Her graduate research focused on social infrastructure, collective capabilities and community resilience in Vancouver during the COVID-19 pandemic. During her studies, she was a 2020 Graduate Fellow in SFU’s Community Engaged Research Initiative (CERi). She also holds an MA in International Relations from the University of Chicago (2007).

Before this, she lived in Greece, where she helped develop and implement the City of Thessaloniki’s first resilience strategy and launched Ashoka Greece, always with a focus on building up a collaborative ecosystem of government, nonprofits, universities, businesses, and community and youth groups. She also enjoyed working on a range of projects or selection juries for social impact and civic participation idea challenges, youth social entrepreneurship initiatives, and socio-cultural projects in Greece and Europe.

When she’s not working or researching, she is enjoying the beautiful parks, lakes, beaches and trails of this region, exploring neighbourhoods, bookstores and coffee shops throughout metro Vancouver, catching up with friends around the world, trying new foods or writing a short story.