We were thrilled to celebrate with some amazing women entrepreneurs, community partners, sponsors, friends and family on May 18, 2017 at our Celebration of Achievement Reception.
This year we hosted the event at the beautiful Oasis Centre in Edmonton. The room was filled with joy, excitement and buzz. With over 200 people in the room, we were honoured to receive greetings from the Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, The Honuorable Navdeep Bains and hear MLA for Edmonton-Meadowlark Jon Carson share his welcome from the Government of Alberta.
The event was dedicated to not only celebrating our 2017 Celebration of Achievement recipient, Jeanette DeBruin, but also announcing the recipients of our Emerging Entrepreneur Award, Emerging Innovator Award and Upsurge Award.
The anticipation built as a video of the finalists in each category appeared on the screen (to view these videos, please click here). We also had a surge of social media which had #AWECelebrates trending on Twitter. Check out our favourite tweets here.
We were thrilled to announce the following as our 2017 Award Recipients:
Jeanette DeBruin, AltaPro Electric, 2017 Celebration of Achievement Award Recipient
Kristi Stuart and Jill Belland, Barre Belle YYC, 2017 AWE Emerging Entrepreneur Award Recipient
Lane Edwards, Pura Botanicals, 2017 AWE Emerging Innovator Award Recipient
Nancy Klensch, Summit Kids, 2017 AWE Upsurge Award Recipient
From Left to Right: Jeannette DeBruin, Lane Edwards, Nancy Klensch, Kristi Stuart
We were very excited to celebrate with these amazing women. We would also like to extend a huge congratulations to all of our nominees and finalists. You are all doing amazing things for our communities and local economies.
A special thanks goes out to our presenting sponsor, ATB Business. We could not do this event without you! Thank you for recognizing the importance of entrepreneurship and making it a focus for your business. We would also like to thank Grant Thornton for your help with our nominee selection process. Thank you to Hillberg and Berk for the beautiful gifts for our recipients and generous gifts for all attendees of the awards program. And last, but certainly not least we would like to thank Quinn Ohler from Global Edmonton for volunteering her time to emcee this year's program.
Our awards program will open again in 2018. If you know someone who would be deserving of one of our four awards, let us know! We can't wait to celebrate with you all next year.
