I think it was the grassroots. I think if I had sat in my cubicle at Industry Canada and said, “I want a women's initiative, and I'm going to do it from here”, it wouldn't have worked.
It's community-based. At Startup London the co-leader is a woman. She's engaging other women. They're engaging each other. In Toronto we have a woman of colour taking the lead. That community is full of women of colour because she's bringing in all of her friends. The peer-led engagement is just really powerful. In Charlottetown we have entrepreneurs in the biotech industry, so now we have a big biotech cluster for Startup Canada there.
It's peer-led grassroots. The way we work is that it really is bottom-up insofar as we encourage local development. You'll never see Startup Canada develop a national policy and impose it on our communities. It really is kind of bottom-up. When government gives us the opportunity, as they have today, to sit at the table—thank you so much for having me—we engage our communities and say, “What do you want us to say? We have this really cool opportunity.” We also put the ask out on Twitter.
It really is bottom-up. What's worked for us—this is how we've engaged aboriginal entrepreneurs—is just that peer-led, making sure they're part of our network and are bringing their networks in. Then they see it as a platform for them.