With Patti-Jay Powell, Executive Director, CFCWest
As local champions of business and community well-being, we know that quality of life, passion and profit can co-exist. We’ve got a full suite of financing and business supports to help rural entrepreneurs.
Community Futures Centre West (CFCWest) is a community driven, non-profit organization staffed by business professionals. We provide a wide range of small business services and business management tools for people wanting to start, expand, franchise or sell a business. We also run several specialized business programs, organize exciting business events and actively work with community and business leaders to foster rural economic growth.
Funded in Western Canada by Western Economic Diversification Canada, Community Futures has been supporting small business and rural economic diversification since 1986. There are 27 Community Futures offices in rural communities throughout Alberta, and a total of 269 across the country.
Established in 1986 by Employment and Immigration Canada (now named Service Canada), Community Futures has been responsible for establishing 90 Community Futures organizations (CFs) throughout rural Western Canada, including 27 offices in Alberta.
Since then, Community Futures has been assisting rural communities to plan and restructure to meet the demands of a changing economy and labour market.
Through Community Futures, the private and public sectors form partnerships with non-metropolitan and smaller communities in transition. Community Futures participates in a local process to assess economic problems and opportunities and to achieve long-term employment stability, growth and adjustment.
Today, with core funding assistance provided by Western Economic Diversification Canada, the CFs in Western Canada are actively engaged in a wide array of community economic diversification activities in their respective regions.
Given the importance of small business to Canada’s changing economy, one of the primary focuses of CFs is to foster entrepreneurial development by providing both financial and business support to new and existing small business. CFs utilize their loan investment funds to achieve the strategic objectives established by their Boards with inputs from the communities they serve.
CFCWest could quite literally be your window of opportunity! Have a great business idea? Please give Ken Koob, our Business Development Advisor a call at 403 437-0904 or email him at busadvisor@albertacf.com
