BMO invests $750,000 into Humber students’ entrepreneurship skills

BMO Financial Group (BMO) has donated $750,000 to help Humber students’ in their entrepreneurial careers and cultivate a diverse and inclusive business community across Canada.

Cheryl Mitchell, the Centre for Entrepreneurship director at Humber College, said the donation would give students’ business ideas and solutions a serious consideration, driving their creativity and innovation towards making them into a business while contributing to a more robust economy.

The donations will come in different formats: the funds will be allocated to support BMO Launch Me Competition, establish entrepreneurship scholarships and offer Entrepreneurship Workshops throughout the next five years.

Mitchell says Humber College has already started implementing some of the programs. The Launch Me competition has begun, allowing students and alumni to win a portion of $135,000 in funding for their startups. The funds are divided into three streams: Women Innovators, Groundbreaker Competition for all current students and New Graduate Startup Competition, available for those who graduated from Humber within the last two years.

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The BMO scholarships will start in the upcoming Winter 2022, allowing full-time students from different programs to apply.

“This experiential learning right to take that those ideas and innovations to the next level. So students will get an opportunity to meet experts in different aspects of entrepreneurship and disciplines that they might not have had access to in their curricular programs. But it gives them those experiential opportunities to apply what they’ve learned in the classroom and put it into practice as they pitch, develop and build up these business ideas,” says Mitchell says.

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The BMO Workshops will start in the Fall 2022 semester and will be offered to Humber students for the next five years. With the access to the BMO professionals that places. So that enables networking for potential internships and other possibilities at BMO for Humber students and alumni.

To honour the BMO’s generous donation, Humber’s Centre for Entrepreneurship event space at Lakeshore Campus will be named the BMO Innovation Commons.