Last Tuesday, October 4th, members of the Edmonton business community and internationally educated professionals gathered together at Sutton Place Hotel to celebrate ERIEC’s seven years of mentorship and networking successes as well as the collaborations of our Edmonton employer partners.
This was ERIEC’s Second Awards & Recognition event which drew a crowd of over 100 well-dressed invitees.
ERIEC honoured the many mentors, networkers and employers for their dedication and commitment to creating inclusive and diverse workplaces for our untapped pool of immigrant talent based here in Edmonton. ERIEC’s employer leaders and partners, who have championed ERIEC’s Career Mentorship and Networking programs, were called upon to receive Employer Partnership awards on behalf of their respective organizations.
MCs Elizabeth Joseph and Sorin Mihailovici, both active ERIEC board members, hosted the evening gala with both style, grace and humour, but also took some time to share their personal immigrant stories with the audience.
ERIEC’s Chairperson, Cindy Laporte, who by day works at TELUS in an HR Managerial capacity, welcomed the audience and thanked everyone for their ongoing support for ERIEC programs.
Tetyana Khramova, ERIEC’s Career Mentorship Director, provided a few words regarding the key milestones of the Career Mentorship Program over the last two years and with the assistance of Eunice Dong, ERIEC’s CMP Mentorship Facilitator, distributed the recognition awards to the CMP mentors who achieved two, three and up to eight Mentoring Star this year. We celebrated the outstanding achievement of more than 550 mentorship matches and recognized 79 Star mentors.
A highlight of the evening for many was the speeches of Seven Star Mentor Daval Desai, Manager, Civil Engineering from Stantec, and his Mentee Ashwin Philip who both provided very inspirational speeches of their experiences in the Career Mentorship Program.
Elena Chernaeva, ERIEC’s Project Coordinator shared a few words about the Networking Programming stream and with the help of the new Program Assistant, Gustave Gatabazi, distributed the recognition awards to ERIEC’s Networking business Connectors.
Tonya Syvitski of Robert Half Management Consulting, one of the recipients of the Networking Star Award, emphasized to all employers of the benefits in volunteering with ERIEC and encouraged them to actively participate in the cultural workshops ERIEC offers through NorQuest College.
To complete the evening, Mr. Doug Piquette, Executive Director of ERIEC, presented the ERIEC Partnership recognition awards: five beautiful hand-made glass awards designed by a local glass artisan, Keith Walker. These were given to ERIEC’s current employer partners: Stantec, Enbridge, City of Edmonton, Telus and Robert Half.
Additional community partner awards were also presented to Deloitte, Microsoft and MC College for their ongoing support to ERIEC programs.
We at ERIEC are very thankful to all of our partners, mentors, mentees, and invited guests! We are also pleased to have met with the peers and colleagues you all kindly invited to the event.
We look forward to your support as we evolve and grow our organization and our programs.