Paola Ruiz

Paola Ruiz is one of ACCESS Community Capital Fund’s many fantastic Facilitators for both of our accelerator programs. We appreciate Paola for her volunteer work with ACCESS during her ideation workshops and for her dedication to our Clients’ success.

When Paola immigrated to Canada over 10 years ago, she found it difficult to find business support and navigate being an entrepreneur in a new country. That is her reasoning for volunteering with ACCESS today.

“There should be a lot of people today that are in the position just as I was 10 years ago,” Paola said. “So, it’s like how can I help them? Because I know exactly what I was looking for and the value for me is just seeing that other people are kind of getting ahead faster than how long it took me.”

Paola is able to bring in her lived experience as an entrepreneur going through the highs and lows of starting a business, and also her work experience, as she now owns her own business consulting practice. There is an intersection between what it is that she does for her own clients and what she does during the business ideation workshops at ACCESS. For Paola, it’s all about what is best for the Client in the accelerator program.

“There was one moment where a lady said, ‘I just got here. This is what I love to do. I don’t even know if it’s a business,’ and I said, ‘this is exactly why we’re running this session, let me walk through a couple of questions,’” Paola said as she recalled one of the interactions between her and a Client during her workshop with the Women’s Business Accelerator Program. “And those moments are the moments that you say, ‘this is why I’m facilitating this session,’ because it’s not about feeding people information that they can read online, or they can find on YouTube, it’s about this interaction.”