Chris Carder is the Executive Director of Innovation & Entrepreneurship at the Schulich School of Business at York University. He helps students and grads build their businesses and advises on entrepreneurship and innovation.

He’s an advisor now, but his expertise was hard-earned in the trenches. Before joining the university, he was a serial entrepreneur with his share of successes—like building Canada’s largest email marketing platform, ThinData—and some failures too. After surviving and thriving through both the dotcom crash and the 2008 recession, Chris sees a world of possibilities in crisis situations and shows us how to see it too.

Fruit of the Land is a Vaughan-based retailer and wholesaler that specializes in farm-fresh foods, kosher gift baskets and holiday gifting. They also produce award-winning foods under a family of brands.

Since the first lockdown in March, co-founders Michael and Stacey Kurtz have fought to survive in their mall-based locations at Promenade, Vaughan Mills and Bayview Village. As a food retailer, they were an essential service but couldn’t operate as such because the malls were closed. Immediately, they started developing an arsenal of strategies to survive and reach their customers.

The College of Carpenters and Allied Trades delivers construction skills courses in its two state-of-the-art facilities in Vaughan. It is home to half of all registered carpenter apprentices in Ontario and provides critical health and safety and continuing education courses for the industry. 

With COVID-19 measures in place, the College can't train as many people at once as they used to. This has far-reaching effects down the entire pipeline for skilled workers, which was already tight before the pandemic. The College needed to rethink its approach–and fast.