by 3H76mdgDq9 | Sep 6, 2026 | BB_Mag
What $10,000 Can’t Buy
BY JACKELYN GILL
Congratulations—you’ve just received a $10,000 grant!
Getting to this stage was hard. You built the business. You made the pitch. You’ve fought for every hard-earned and hard-won dollar. You’ve even made plans for how to spend it.
But what actually happens two days from now? Two months? Two years?
For women business owners like Liz Cripps, founder of WACADS Group, those answers aren’t always so clear.
The cash investment she received from the BMO For Women Celebrating Women Grant in 2024 was a welcome infusion. But it wouldn’t solve the credibility roadblocks she faced scaling her smart automation technology business beyond narrowly scoped SMB projects into larger-scale, complex contracts with enterprise-sized clients.
That ambition required more.
by 3H76mdgDq9 | Sep 6, 2026 | MLoop
There’s a Reason for This Season
BY IDALIN McKENZIE
Running My Own Race
The first time I realized I was on a different path, it didn’t feel bold. It felt uncertain.
As the first in my family to pursue a career and entrepreneurial path like this, there was no blueprint to follow. No clear route to the destination. Just a belief that I needed to keep going and figure it out along the way.
From early on, I learned that life is a marathon, not a sprint. That perspective has stayed with me through uncertainty and change, grounding me in moments when the path ahead wasn’t clear. I often remind myself: there is a reason for this season.
by 3H76mdgDq9 | Sep 6, 2026 | MLoop
SPACE TO BREATHE
BY SIMONE HARRINGTON
Winning WXN’s Canada’s Most Powerful Women: Top 100 created a natural pause for me.
A moment to reflect on what brought me here. The people who supported me along the way. And how I might pay that forward in supporting others as they pursue their own ambitions.
In that reflection, I found myself drawn to something familiar.
Nature.
Not because I consider myself particularly outdoorsy. I don’t. I would choose a warm, comfortable cabin over a tent every time. But there is something about being outside, walking through the woods, along the water, moving without urgency, that brings a kind of stillness I don’t find anywhere else.
It’s where my thinking clears.
Where I can hear myself.
by 3H76mdgDq9 | Sep 6, 2026 | BB_Mag
The Art of Becoming Iconic
BY JACKELYN GILL
It’s one thing to snap a photograph as evocative as The Path. A lone figure silhouetted as he walks down an empty country road, head bowed and wind whipping his long hair and coat to one side. Leafless trees peek from behind a curtain of mist. The image is striking, lonely, somewhere between sadness and quietness.
It’s another thing entirely for that image to make it into the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris, chosen from a pool of 60,000 submissions by the world’s top photographers for the Salon des Beaux Arts.
So, imagine the surprise of Patricia Gagic, a world-renowned abstract painter and contemporary artist, when she was named the gold medal winner in 2018. “I was the first Canadian woman to receive the honour since the inception of the photography category,” she says.
And it didn’t stop there.
by 3H76mdgDq9 | Sep 6, 2026 | Mandich, MLoop
The Happiness Paradox: When Success Still Feels Empty
BY DR. GILLIAN MANDICH
You did everything that was supposed to make you happy.
You worked hard. You achieved goals. You built a career. You kept going when it was hard. From the outside, your life may even look like the kind of life people aspire to.
So why does it sometimes feel … strangely flat?
Why, after everything you’ve accomplished, do you find yourself wondering, Is this it? Or worse: What is wrong with me?
If you’ve ever had that thought, the problem is not you. The problem is the story you were told about happiness.
