Chantelle Buffie was recognized for her entrepreneurial achievements by Enactus Canada last week
By Alison Roach
Photos by SFU PAMR
Chantelle Buffie, a SFU Beedie School of Business student, was named the 2013 HSBC Woman Leader of Tomorrow at the Enactus Canada national competition in Toronto last week. Enactus Canada is a group of student, academic, and business leaders with chapters throughout the country, including one at SFU.
Buffie spent a week in Toronto, first at the Enactus conference, and then networking with Telus team members — where she currently holds a job back in Surrey as a business analyst. She also continues to take part time classes at SFU, and work on the business she and partner Sonam Swarup founded, Fusion Kitchen.
All these accomplishments led to Buffie being awarded the regional, and then the national title. “I went to Toronto just to support the [Enactus SFU] national competition team that was going, and to see if I won the national award,” said Buffie. “I was against a lot of accomplished females as well, so I was quite surprised that I won.”
The title comes with a $2,500 prize to be used by the Enactus SFU chapter to start a program that targets helping women develop socially and professionally, a concept that Buffie is no stranger to. Fusion Kitchen, which celebrates its second birthday at the end of this month, is a startup social enterprise that offers cultural cooking classes in Vancouver, taught by immigrant women.
Buffie explained that her and Swarup’s backgrounds led them to come up with the idea for Fusion Kitchen, as a way to ease the transition of women who are newcomers to Canada.
“Her parents are from Fiji and my mother comes from the Phillipines,” said Buffie. “We really wanted to ease the transition of immigrant women, or males as well, coming into Canada. A lot of the time they come from very educational backgrounds; a lot of the women we see have masters and PhDs, and it’s sad to see that they’re not getting into the areas they want to get into.”
She continued, “We want to break that cycle, and offer them a work experience that other employers might not provide.”
Initially, Buffie and Swarup intended to focus on recent immigrants, people who had been in the country for less than two years, but found that many applicants to teach the classes were not that new to the country, but still having difficulty transitioning into Canadian life. The two women Buffie and Swarup are currently working with have been in the country for about five years or so.
Fusion Kitchen initially began as a simple school project for a social entrepreneurship class Buffie took in fall 2011, but quickly blossomed into something larger with the support the girls found. “We got a lot of positive feedback from Shawn Smith [a Beedie lecturer], and the SFU Beedie community,” said Buffie. Fusion Kitchen won the first top prize of the Social Entrepreneurship Accelerator program and awarded $2,500 to go towards the business.
Fusion Kitchen has now offered six classes, but is having some venue issues now that their previous venue, Save-On-Meats, is currently under renovations. Buffie and Swarup are currently focusing on looking for a suitable space to continue the program. Once classes are up and running again, the team hopes to target more corporate groups who want to do social teambuilding events through the classes.
For now, Buffie continues to divide her attention. “My focus right now is Fusion Kitchen, building up my experience at Telus, and school,” she said with a laugh, “Finishing up school!”
