By Kenzie Love
A group of fellow immigrant professionals started the Expertise Hub Cooperative in 2024, inspired by a problem they’d encountered in their home of St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador that is also common across Canada.
“We kept seeing the same pattern happening again and again,” says Fazli. “Newcomers come here with advanced education, with PhDs, masters degrees. But they struggle to find employment in their own field of study, so they have to work in general jobs. Sometimes they lose their qualifications because they don’t use it for such a long time, or sometimes they lose their confidence to apply for a job. So we thought ‘we need to find a solution for this.’”
Their solution was to create a co-op that would allow its members to take on paid, short-term contracted work that builds Canadian experience, offers professional training and mentorship, and supports employers to hire inclusively. Key project areas include consulting, policy development and analysis, project management, environmental initiatives, communications and branding, and software development.
Under the Expertise Hub’s model, clients sign contracts with the Co-op for them to deliver on a project, thereby making the Co-op accountable. If clients want to check references first, they can do so with others whom the Expertise Hub has contracted with.
“So basically, if an organization was thinking of having a new platform or website for their organization but they didn’t have the internal capacity to do that,” says Fazli, “they sign the contract with us, and then we engage a software developer in our membership with that experience and background to develop a website for them.”
Although the Expertise Hub’s founders had little prior experience with co-ops, Fazli says its appeal became clear the more they learned about it, drawn to the idea of an organization democratically governed by its members.
“What is important for us is to create a space where members can contribute and also can benefit from the structure,” she says. “And they are part of the structure. They are co-creating, and there is a space for everyone to add and also benefit from this platform and space.”
Seeing the Co-op’s members gain Canadian work experience as a result of belonging to the Expertise Hub has been a particularly rewarding experience for Fazli.
“People were able to basically put their experience and expertise into projects and also have an income and more economic security through the cooperative,” she says.
In the coming years, the Expertise Hub hopes to build on the successes it’s already achieved and broaden its scope, expanding within Newfoundland and Labrador and ultimately throughout Canada.
“I feel that if we can get more recognition, if we can have more visibility, we will be able to get more projects, bigger projects, and with bigger projects, we can engage more newcomers, more internationally trained individuals in meaningful work,” she says. “So I think one of our targets for the upcoming period is to extend our partnerships to organizations in different provinces and build our visibility not just in our province, but also elsewhere.”