Seher Shafiq is co-founder (with her husband, Saad Khan) of Cardamom & Co, a home-based business that is spreading joy and connection through personalized care packages and gifts, with a special focus on Handcrafted DIY Chai Kits.
Seher and Saad created Cardamom & Co. as a by-product of pandemic boredom, and to their surprise, the business took off! In it’s first six months, Cardamom & Co. has sent hundreds of care packages across all corners of North America, including to British Colombia, New Brunswick, Manitoba, Alberta, Quebec, Saskatchewan, rural Nunavut, New York, San Francisco (and other parts of Cali), Washington, Seattle, Pennsylvania, Chicago, Virginia, Denver, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and of course all over Ontario.Cardamom & Co. also works with corporate clients to create customized staff appreciation gifts and team activities.
You can follow us on Instagram at @cardamomandco_.
Cardamom & Co. is a side hustle that Seher started. Her full-time work is in the non-profit sector where Seher works on civic issues. Seher currently works at North York Community House as the Active Citizenship Manager, where she is co-designing new civic engagement programming that will be adopted by settlement agencies across Canada. Seher is also currently an Editor for Ryerson’s new First Policy Response initiative, which seeks to feature policy ideas that will get us through the COVID-19 crisis and to a fair and sustainable recovery.
In 2019, Seher led the country’s very first national non-partisan voter engagement campaign out of Ryerson’s Democratic Engagement Exchange. As part of this campaign, Seher travelled coast-to-coast to deliver voter engagement trainings to community-based organizations across the country and convened the Canadian Vote Coalition, the first campaign of its kind.
Prior to this, Seher was a Program Manager for the flagship DiverseCity Fellows program at CivicAction, where she worked with hundreds of emerging and senior leaders to tackle some of the biggest challenges facing the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA).
Seher also has experience working in the refugee and resettlement sector at Lifeline Syria, as well as at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland.