Entrepreneurs showcase their new businesses

By Neil Armstrong

Thirty-six entrepreneurs showed off their businesses at the weekend as graduates of Street Entrepreneurs 3.0 featuring businesses built through a 16-week incubator designed for Black, formerly incarcerated and justice-impacted persons and their families.

Nearly four million Canadians live with a criminal record. For many, the consequences continue long after a sentence ends, creating barriers to employment and economic participation.

Among the founders presenting their ventures to the public at the University of Toronto’s Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus as part of the Street Entrepreneurs Showcase and Trade Show, “From the Block to Boardroom,” on September 12, were Glamma of Voice Equity Institute and Shianne Nazana Kumar of G1gGl3z.

For over 16 weeks, the women and their colleagues moved from business ideas to market-ready enterprises through business planning, financial literacy, marketing, e-commerce infrastructure and customer management. Each participant left the program with a registered business, business plan, website and online store.

A growing number already have their first paying customers, noted urban Rez Solutions Social Enterprise, a Toronto-based nonprofit social enterprise that has been around for 22 years.

Glamma, a two-time entrepreneur, multi-disciplinary artist and facilitator, started her first business, Singing Thunder Jewellery, out of an earlier iteration of Street Entrepreneurs.

“I create one-of-a-kind beaded, crystal and mixed-media jewellery inspired by culture, slow fashion, traditional techniques and storytelling. One of the opportunities that came directly from the program was having my jewellery included in the Harry Jerome Awards swag bags, which introduced the brand to a much wider audience.”

Through Street Entrepreneurs 3.0, she launched her second venture, Voice Equity Institute, a service-based, for-profit social enterprise that brings together more than six years of her work with women through community programming, arts-based learning, facilitation and professional development.

“The institute grew from a pattern I kept seeing: Black, Indigenous and newcomer women, as well as youth, are constantly told to be more confident, speak up and advocate for themselves, while very little attention is paid to the environments that can make speaking up risky in the first place.”

Its mission is to help women recognize the value of their voice, build the confidence to use it, and turn that voice into greater agency, opportunity and economic power.

Street Entrepreneurs helps individuals strengthen their voice, negotiation skills, boundaries and self-advocacy, while also assisting corporations and organizations understand what silence may be costing them through lost ideas, stalled advancement, disengagement and employee turnover.”

Glamma said Voice Equity Institute is pioneering a first-of-its-kind model in Canada for measurable voice equity, combining organizational diagnostics, culturally responsive training and follow-up measurement to address both the personal and systemic barriers that affect whether women are able to speak, advance and be heard.

Kumar has been financially impacted by a member of her family being incarcerated. She joined Street Entrepreneurs 3.0 to build her family’s income and their next chapter together.

Her business, G1gGl3z, is a neighbourhood laundromat with extended hours, planned for a Toronto community in East York that has been without a laundromat for two years.

Co-led by executive directors Roderick Brereton and Farley Flex Nwaigbo, Urban Rez has served more than 500 participants across programs supporting formerly incarcerated and justice-impacted persons and their families, at-risk youth, and community members seeking new pathways. 

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