Enterprise Bridge Toronto: Fostering immigrant economic integration

Urban poverty affects 13.2% of Toronto's population, exceeding national and provincial averages. The city's child and family poverty rate reached 25.3% in 2022. Among Toronto's 2.76 million residents, 55.7% are racialized, with immigrants experiencing higher low-income rates (8.7%) compared to non-immigrants (6.3%).

Entrepreneurship offers a pathway to alleviate poverty, particularly for immigrants who comprise 22% of Canada's population but run 25% of small and medium enterprises. However, immigrant-led firms face greater financial fragility and challenges navigating Canadian business practices, securing financing, and building social capital. Sen's (1999) capability approach highlights that resources alone don't guarantee opportunity creation—disadvantaged individuals face both resource constraints and limited capabilities to develop successful ventures.

To address these challenges, the Global Migration Institute partnered with the University of Notre Dame to implement the Urban Poverty and Business Initiative (UPBI) in Toronto. The project recruits immigrants with business ideas or early-stage entrepreneurs, providing training, mentoring, counselling, and community connections over three years. Enterprise Bridge Toronto is a pilot project implemented in partnership with the University of Notre Dame’s Urban Poverty and Business Initiatives (external link)  (UPBI). The

UPBI project is under implementation in over 50 cities across the globe. 

Enterprise Bridge Toronto focuses on the economic integration of immigrants in the city of Toronto, with the goal to empower economically disadvantaged immigrants by supporting them with the tools and knowledge to start and grow sustainable businesses through a set of six key components: training, mentoring, consulting, networking, microcredit, and research and tracking. The project will actively engage with entrepreneurs for over a 11-month period to implement above mentioned activities and track their progress for three years.

This project will be implemented in six components over an eleven-month period: 

• Training: The program begins with six weekly boot camps held in a community to introduce tools, concepts, and principles relevant to launching and growing a successful enterprise;
• Mentoring: Entrepreneurs can receive a mentor who is a successful entrepreneur, generally in the type of business area the entrepreneur is working on;
• Consulting: This initiative connects entrepreneurs one-on-one with a consultant from faculty, graduate students,  undergraduate students, or other partners to help them solve specific problems they face in the process of venture creation;
• Resource Connect: At least two community connection events will be held per program year to provide networking opportunities. The aim is to connect the disadvantaged entrepreneurs to the larger business community and encourage community members to do business with our entrepreneurs;
• Microcredit: The aim of this activity is to work with local organizations and financial institutions to provide low-interest and no-interest loans and grants to disadvantaged individuals who want to launch business ventures;
• Research and tracking: The progress of entrepreneurs will be tracked for a period of three years, centered on the 80-activity steps that are identified as crucial to launching a sustainable venture.

Training

We successfully completed six bootcamp sessions from November 8 to December 13, with 28 participants graduating from the program. During the launch of the session, Professor Anna Triandafyllidou, welcomed the delegates and Prof. Dr. Michael Morris from Notre Dame delivered the first session of the bootcamp.  

The training sessions were highly engaging and well received by the participants. They were impressed by the modality of the training sessions that covered teaching, interaction with entrepreneurs, and special sessions from subject matter experts.

Over two-thirds of these participants are women. They have very interesting business ideas ranging from food and beverage; technology and consulting; art design and lifestyle; social impact and community services; health wellness and online retail; and construction. Most of them are in the early stages of business creation, and a few of them have already launched their products. 

Current project phase

Mentoring: The project is currently in the mentoring phase, designed to provide long-term continued support which will run through April 2026.

Research: REB application is in progress to conduct research on the topic "Enterprise Bridge Toronto: Immigrant Entrepreneurs, Business Creation, Integration Support and Sense of Belonging".