Business incubators and city join forces in Starter Company grant program for youth entrepreneurs

Knoll, 21, and Vital, 19, whose real name is Hiruy Girmay, were both quick to get photos of themselves with Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, who was visiting the incubator of musical talent in the Wexford Heights area to launch the city’s participation in Starter Company, a provincial grant program for young entrepreneurs.

Young recording artists are "no different than any traditional business that is getting started," said Coalition co-founder Eric Lawrence, who along with partner Rob Lanni transformed the one-time religious building four years ago into a studio space where, each year, "up to 80 businesses are registered."

The City of Toronto’s Enterprise Toronto service will work with Coalition and other incubators on Starter Company, which could give 45 entrepreneurs between the ages of 18 and 29 advice on starting a business from mentors, and then grants of up to $5,000.

It’s the latest thing the city is doing to help young people get jobs and start careers, said Michael Thompson, Toronto’s economic development chairperson for the past four years.

"If you succeed today, we all succeed tomorrow," he said from the stage at the press conference, adding it’s important for the municipal government "to do all we can."

Whether the city is doing all it can is debatable, considering Toronto’s 18.1-percent rate of youth unemployment, but Thompson said city hall has managed to take 30,000 residents off the social assistance roll, "an amazing feat," during this term, and is spending more on the arts per person than ever.

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Toronto’s business improvement areas and its Fashion Incubator are ideas so successful they’re being copied in other cities around the world, added the Scarborough Centre councillor.

"We’re exporting a lot of things that we do because we’re doing it extremely well."

Ford, who has been hammered by one of his opponents, Olivia Chow, on the issue of youth unemployment since returning to the mayoral race a month ago, said Starter Company and the Ontario Youth Jobs Strategy will fill an essential role.

Youth need all the support they can get in finding and creating work for themselves, the mayor said.

"As a small-business man myself, I understand the challenges," Ford added, pointing out nearly half of new enterprises do not last five years.

He also said he remembered Vital was a great basketball player in high school. "There’s something about athletics and music that mixes," he concluded.

Vital, who lives in Pickering but attended Wexford Collegiate School for the Arts, got the audience clapping Monday with his track, Tokyo, for which he recently shot a video in Japan. He’s now pushing through social media to get Tokyo some radio play while working on his second album.

He joined Coalition’s Artist Entrepreneur Program in 2012, and recalled that, besides helping him with creative matters, it gave him business skills he was lacking, such as budgeting and setting personal goals.

Knoll, whose song, ‘This War,’ got a "wow" from Thompson, was in the Coalition program last year and said it helped her grow at a time, she said, when "you don’t really know what you’re supposed to be doing; you just love doing it."

The Richmond Hill resident, "trying to get my name out there," is moving to downtown Toronto this week, and just released a first album.

Besides Starter Company, the city also takes applications for Summer Company, grants of up to $3,000 for high school and university students who want to start businesses over the summer.

More on either program is available at toronto.ca/enterprisetoronto or by visiting Enterprise Toronto offices at city hall on Queen Street, North York Civic Centre on Yonge Street and at Scarborough Civic Centre on Borough Drive.