FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Calgary, Alberta - Enactus UCalgary’s Empower program, a student-led business skills training program, has placed second-runner up in Enactus Canada’s TD Entrepreneurship Challenge Western Regional Competition for its social impact project for immigrant women entrepreneurs. The program offers weekly entrepreneurial workshops guided by University of Calgary student mentors and taught by business professionals, professors, and entrepreneurs.
Immigrant women have a high potential to introduce innovation in their businesses but half as likely as immigrant men to start a business due to racial and gender barriers, lack of networks, limited access to funding, and Canadian business knowledge.
Empower’s mission is to empower immigrant women as aspiring entrepreneurs to start their own businesses by providing them with business knowledge, a network, and a final pitch competition with monetary grants up to $1000.
Over the course of one year, the program has created 17 developed business plans and increased its mentees’ knowledge of the Canadian business world by 43% and knowledge of Canadian finance by 40%.
This year’s pitch competition winners included Grissel Aguilar for her business INMI-CAN, Joan Vasquez for her business The CURE Deli Shop, and Eliana Anzures for her business Paper Bird.
Enactus UCalgary leveraged its community connections to collaborate with entrepreneurial ecosystems such as Platform Calgary, The Calgary Innovation Coalition, Momentum, and the Calgary Immigration Society in order to position Empower as a ‘baby incubator’. The program plans to double the number of immigrant women participating from 10 to 20 mentees next year by digitizing its content and creating an online platform, allowing for international expansion.
Enactus UCalgary is a social entrepreneurship club that is part of Enactus, a global non-profit that provides financial and learning resources for students to implement community projects locally and internationally.
The team will travel to Montreal in early May to compete at the National Exposition.
For more information about Enactus UCalgary’s Empower program, please visit enactuscalgary.ca
Contact:
Lauren Gross
VP Marketing, Enactus UCalgary
Email: enactusinfo@gmail.com
RSS Feed