Understanding Queer and Trans Entrepreneurship in Edmonton
Beyond Barriers: Understanding Queer and Trans Entrepreneurship in Edmonton
WELCOME
This primer is an introduction.
The Beyond Barriers project is exploring the entrepreneurial experiences of Queer and trans people in Edmonton — the barriers they face, the strategies they use to navigate them, and what a more inclusive business environment might look like. This document offers a window into that work: why it matters, how it's being done, and what we're beginning to learn.
It isn't meant to be a comprehensive research report. Think of it as a shared foundation — a way of bringing readers into the conversation with enough context to understand the challenge, enough evidence to appreciate its stakes, and enough openness to stay curious about what comes next.
You'll find here: the gap this project is responding to; the partners and community members making it possible; a snapshot of what existing research tells us about Queer and trans entrepreneurship; and early themes emerging from listening sessions with Edmonton entrepreneurs who were generous enough to share their stories.
This work is grounded in the belief that Queer and trans voices belong at the centre of conversations about their own economic lives — not as an afterthought, but as the starting point.
THE CHALLENGE WE’RE EXPLORING
Queer and trans people are entrepreneurs at higher rates — often not by choice, but by necessity. Exclusion from traditional workplaces, discrimination in hiring, and the psychological weight of navigating environments that weren't built with them in mind have pushed many members of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community toward building something of their own. Entrepreneurship, in this sense, is often less about opportunity and more about survival — and sometimes, about creating the kind of affirming, community-rooted spaces that didn't otherwise exist.
And yet, the path to building and sustaining a business is rarely straightforward for Queer and trans entrepreneurs. Research is beginning to document the barriers they face — difficulty accessing funding, exclusion from mainstream business networks, challenges finding safe and affirming spaces to operate — but that evidence base remains thin, and almost none of it speaks to Edmonton specifically.
This project aims to shift that.
Beyond Barriers is asking a deceptively simple question:
What is it actually like to be a Queer or trans entrepreneur in Edmonton?
From the earliest spark of an idea through to the ongoing work of keeping a business alive, where do people encounter walls
— and how do they find ways through or around them?
This project is also rooted in something beyond documenting barriers. Queerness is an experience of generativity. The same exclusionary practices that push Queer and trans entrepreneurs out of ‘conventional’ paths have also cultivated a reimaginingbuilding structures, relationships, and ways of working that didn't exist before. The barrier and deprivation frame is not the whole story. This project is equally interested in the creativity, resilience, and radical reimagining that Queer and trans entrepreneurs bring to business and community.
We are engaging a diverse range of entrepreneurs across different kinds of ventures: makers and market vendors, online sellers, creatives, retail and hospitality owners, and tech founders. And because the 2SLGBTQIA+ community is not a monolith, we are paying particular attention to the ways that race, Indigeneity, disability, newcomer status, and other dimensions of identity shape these experiences in distinct and intersecting ways.
The goal isn't just to document the problem. It's to generate the kind of grounded, Edmonton-specific knowledge that can actually move things — informing better policies, more responsive services, and a business ecosystem that works for everyone.
WHO IS PART OF THIS WORK
This project is a collaboration — between organizations, researchers, and most importantly, the Queer and trans entrepreneurs whose lived experiences are at the heart of everything we're learning.
Alberta 2SLGBTQIA+ Chamber of Commerce Project Lead
The Alberta 2SLGBTQIA+ Chamber of Commerce is the province's only chamber of commerce dedicated to gender- and sexually-diverse communities. Their mandate is to foster a strong, inclusive Alberta economy by connecting, educating, and supporting Queer and trans entrepreneurs and professionals. The Chamber leads this project and brings deep roots in Edmonton's Queer business community — roots that have made it possible to reach the entrepreneurs whose stories inform this work.
Action Lab Process and Design
Action Lab is a social innovation consultancy and social enterprise of Skills Society, with recognized expertise in service design, participatory research, and community-led problem solving. Action Lab is leading the design and facilitation of the listening sessions and journey mapping workshops at
the heart of this project, and is supporting the development of the practical tools and resource guides that will come out of it. Their space on 124th Street in Edmonton is home to many of the in-person sessions.
Dr. Leanne Hedberg Research Partner
At the time of engagement, Dr. Leanne Hedberg held the Canada Research Chair in Inclusive Entrepreneurship and was a lead researcher on the national Rainbow Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub — a $3.2 million research initiative exploring the systemic constraints facing 2SLGBTQIA+ entrepreneurs across Canada. Her national findings are informing and enriching what we're learning locally, helping us situate Edmonton's story within a broader picture.
The City of Edmonton and Edmonton Community Foundation Funders
This project is made possible through the generous support of the City of Edmonton (specifically the 2SLGBTQIA+ Beyond Belonging Grant Program) and the Edmonton Community Foundation. Their investment in this work reflects a shared commitment to building a more inclusive and equitable Edmonton.
The Entrepreneurs
None of this work would be possible without the Queer and trans entrepreneurs who have given their time, their trust, and their stories to this project. Sharing lived experience — especially experience that includes discrimination, exclusion, and hardship — is an act of generosity. We don't take it lightly, and we are committed to ensuring that what we learn from these conversations leads to real and meaningful change.
We acknowledge that this work takes place on Treaty 6 Territory and the Homeland of the Métis — land with a deep and ongoing history that shapes the context in which all of us live, work, and build. We recognize the Two-Spirit and Indigenous members of Edmonton's Queer community whose voices and experiences are especially important to this work, and we carry a responsibility to ensure they are centred, not marginalized, in what we produce.
OUR APPROACH
We believe research and design should be done with community — not extracted from it. That principle shapes everything about how this project is designed.
Listening First
The foundation of this work is conversation. We began by conducting in-depth listening sessions with Queer and trans entrepreneurs in Edmonton — open, one-on-one conversations designed to create enough space for people to share not just facts about their businesses, but the texture of their experiences. What has been hard. What has helped. What they wish existed. These conversations are the richest source of insight we have, and they inform everything that follows.
Journey Mapping
Building on what we hear in the listening sessions, we are using a method called journey mapping to make sense of the entrepreneurial experience as a whole — exploring cycles of experience, from the spark of possibly becoming a business owner through to growing and succession, and everything in between. Engaging in reflections on these cycles of experience will help illuminate where Queer and trans entrepreneurs encounter barriers, gaps, or moments of unexpected support. Journey mapping is a participatory method, meaning it happens with community members rather than being done to them. Workshop participants are the experts in the room.
Triangulating What We Learn
No single source of insight tells the whole story. Throughout this project we are drawing on three streams of knowledge and bringing them into conversation with each other: what entrepreneurs share from their own lived experience; what existing research and literature tells us about 2SLGBTQIA+ entrepreneurship more broadly; and what emerges from the collective sense-making that happens in workshops. The richest insights tend to live at the intersection of all three.
Values That Guide Us
A few commitments run through everything we do in this project. We approach all engagement in a trauma-informed way, recognizing that many of the experiences we're asking people to reflect on are difficult ones. We centre intersectionality — understanding that being Queer or trans is one dimension of identity among many, and that race, Indigeneity, disability, newcomer status, and other factors shape people's experiences in distinct ways that we must actively listen for. And we are committed to making sure this work produces something useful — not just a document that sits on a shelf, but tools and recommendations that the community can actually use.
Thinking in Horizons
It helps to have a shared way of thinking about the scope of change this project is working toward. We're using a framework called Three Horizons1 to do that.
Horizon 1 (Same Game, Same Rules) is the present landscape — the existing systems, structures, and practices that shape the experience of Queer and trans entrepreneurs right now. This includes the barriers built into how funding is accessed, how business spaces are rented, how networks are formed, and how institutions operate. Horizon 1 isn't all bad — there are things working well that deserve to be understood and strengthened — but it's also where much of the exclusion and harm currently lives.
Horizon 2 (Same Game, Different Rules) is where innovation is already beginning to happen — the emerging practices, experiments, and community-led responses that are starting to shift things. Affirming market spaces, peer mentorship networks, inclusive procurement practices, and community-based approaches to financing are all examples of Horizon 2 thinking already taking shape in Edmonton and beyond.
Horizon 3 (Different Game, Different Rules) is the longer-horizon vision — a future where the business ecosystem is genuinely designed for Queer and trans people to thrive, where identity is no longer a barrier to economic participation, and where the innovations of today have become the new normal.
This project is primarily focused on Horizons 1 and 2 — understanding the present reality deeply, and identifying the emerging practices and changes that show the most promise. But we think it's important to keep Horizon 3 in view. The journey mapping workshops are partly about practical problem solving, and partly about giving people permission to imagine something bigger.
1 Three Horizons Framework (McKinsey & Company, 2009), adapted by Mark Cabaj, Here to There Consulting Inc.
Innovative actions that can be implemented with minor tweaks to existing polices and systems.
Predictable, quicker, modest.
Easier - and less resistance - to implement. Changes in capabilities not required.
Same Game, Different Rules Different Game, Different Rules
Innovative actions that require substantive changes to existing systems and policies in order to make a deeper and more lasting change.
Less predictable, slower, more substantive.
More difficultsome resistanceto implement. Possibly new capabilities required.
Actions that are based on radically new ideas, values, and beliefs that require radical changes in polices and systems.
Unpredictable, possibly long term, transformative.
Possibly very difficult to implement. Many capabilties unknown; need to be developed over time.
HORIZON 1
HORIZON 2
HORIZON 3
THE CURRENT LANDSCAPE: TRENDS & SHAPING FACTORS
What follows is not a comprehensive literature review. It is a snapshot, a selection of findings from recent Canadian research that helps paint a picture of the broader context in which Edmonton's Queer and trans entrepreneurs are building their businesses.
When Workplaces Aren’t Safe, People Build their Own
Emerging research shows that for many Queer and trans people in Canada, entrepreneurship is less a choice than a response — a way of constructing economic security when conventional employment has proven unsafe, unwelcoming, or simply closed off. Research consistently documents that 2SLGBTQIA+ people, and trans and gender non-conforming people in particular, face persistent barriers to employment and advancement in traditional workplaces.2 For example, a 2016 survey found that 45% of respondents believed their workplace was not inclusive of trans employees.3 These are not marginal experiences — they are systemic patterns that push people out of conventional work and toward building something of their own.
An Uneven Starting Place
Current data shows that many Queer and trans entrepreneurs are starting their businesses not from a position of financial security but from one of economic precarity. Statistics Canada's analysis of 2021 Census data found that transgender
women earned 20.3% less than cisgender men, transgender men earned 10.1% less, and non-binary people earned 5.9% less, even after controlling for age and employment characteristics.4 Older data from the Trans Pulse Project found that despite 71% of trans people having at least some post-secondary education, approximately half earned $15,000 or less annually.⁴ This is the financial ground many Queer and trans entrepreneurs are standing on when they decide to start something — without inherited wealth, without family capital, and often without access to the financial literacy and networks that others take for granted.
Barriers in the Business Ecosystem
Moving into entrepreneurship does not mean leaving discrimination behind. The Diversity Institute's 2022 Canadian report found that approximately 37% of 2SLGBTQ+ entrepreneurs choose not to be public about their identity when accessing funding or services, specifically to avoid discrimination.5 In the Trans Pulse Project report from 2015, approximately 28% of 2SLGBTQ+owned businesses reported experiencing discrimination directly because of the owner's identity.6 A 2024 report from Startup Canada and the Canadian Queer Chamber of Commerce found that 75% of Queer founders reported actively concealing their identity and ownership status.7 The funding landscape compounds these challenges: as the Diversity Institute report notes, most funders tend to be white, heterosexual, and
cisgender, creating structural, not merely attitudinal, barriers to capital access for Queer and trans entrepreneurs.⁵
The Social and Political Climate
The broader social and political climate shapes experiences, opportunities, and realities for Queer and trans entrepreneurs. Statistics Canada reported that between 2020 and 2023, hate crimes targeting sexual orientation more than tripled, and hate crimes targeting gender identity or expression have more than doubled over the same period.8 Alberta has not been exempt from this trend — according to reporting by Global News, Alberta RCMP noted a significant spike in hate-related incidents in 2023.9 These are not abstract trends. They shape real decisions Queer and trans entrepreneurs make, including things like: where to locate a business, how to market to Queer communities, whether to be out as a Queer-owned enterprise, and what safety measures need to be built into everyday operations.
This context is part of what makes Edmonton-specific research not just useful but necessary. Understanding how Queer and trans entrepreneurs are navigating this climate — and what would make it easier to do so — is one of the things this project is trying to learn.
The Edmonton Gap
Despite this growing national evidence base, no co-design research, that we are aware of, has mapped the entrepreneurial experiences of 2SLGBTQIA+ people in Edmonton specifically. This means we are limited in understanding what barriers are most acute in this particular context, or what local resources and networks are making a difference. That absence is not neutral — it means that policymakers, funders, and support organizations have been making decisions without the evidence they need to make them well.
This project is seeking to shift this.
2 Women Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub (WEKH). (2022, updated 2024). Supports for 2SLGBTQ+ entrepreneurs across Canada. https://wekh.ca/ supports-for-2slgbtq-entrepreneurs/
3 Ibid. Citing a 2016 survey of over 800 Canadians examining lesbian and gay experiences in the workplace.
4 Statistics Canada. (2025). Socioeconomic outcomes of transgender and non-binary people in Canada (Catalogue No. 91F0015M). https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/ pub/91f0015m/91f0015m2025001-eng.htm
5 Diversity Institute (Toronto Metropolitan University). (2022). Access and equity for 2SLGBTQ+ businesses in Canada. https:// www.torontomu.ca/content/dam/diversity/ reports/Access-and-Equity-for-2SLGBTQBusinesses-in-Canada.pdf
6 Trans Pulse Project. (2015). Statistics relevant for human rights policy. https://transpulseproject.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/ Trans-PULSE-Statistics-Relevant-forHuman-Rights-Policy-June-2015.pdf
7 Startup Canada & Canadian Queer Chamber of Commerce (CQCC). (2024). Queer entrepreneurs outperform, yet equitable support still sorely lacking in Canada. https://www. startupcan.ca/queer-entrepreneurs-outperform-yet-equitable-support-still-sorely-lacking-in-canada/
8 Statistics Canada. (2025, March 25). Policereported hate crime in Canada, 2023. The Daily. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/250325/dq250325a-eng.htm
9 Briere, T. (2023, June 22). LGBTQ2 hate incidents spike across Alberta; RCMP encourage reporting. Global News. https://globalnews. ca/tag/alberta-hate-crime/
WHAT WE’RE HEARING FROM EDMONTON’S QUEER ENTREPRENEURS
Here we share some high level insights and preliminary themes from eight, 60 minute conversations we had with Queer Entrepreneurs. This is not meant to be a robust synthesis of themes, but instead provides an overview of some interesting and relevant insights given the scope of this particular project.
This small snapshot of experiences, helped inform the development of the workshops, providing early signals as to where we should focus energy and create space for additional sharing. The workshops will act as additional data collection opportunities to further understand the experiences of Queer Entrepreneurs.
Theme 1: Being out isn't one decision. It's many.
For many of the founders we talked to, choosing how visible to be isn't a one-time call. It comes up again in every email signature. Every social post. Every networking room. Every vendor call.
What changes the answer? Who's in the room. The venue. The news cycle. Whether the bar across town just got a brick through its window. This work doesn't show up on paper anywhere. But it's real, and it adds up over years.
There's a tension that comes with it. Visibility can be how people find you. It can also be how people target you. Some founders stay low-key on purpose. Referral only. Hard to find for the wrong people. Others are fully out and accept the cost. Most are
somewhere in between, and the answer shifts day to day.
Theme 2: Often, the founder is the first customer.
Several founders we talked to didn't start their business by finding a gap in the market and filling it. They started because the thing they needed didn't exist, and someone had to make it. That someone was them. The founder is the first customer. Sometimes the first person who really needed it. Often the first proof it could work.
This is a different kind of business than a typical small business. It's closer to community infrastructure. The economics work differently. The growth logic works differently. The reasons to keep going work differently. Some of these founders have built their values directly into the legal structure of the business from day one. Capping the size of the team. Setting limits on growth. Choosing a legal form that fits the mission, not the market. These aren't values on a wall. They're commitments built into the bones of the business.
Theme 3: Care isn't a cost. It is the product.
Business advice often treats emotional and relational work as inefficiency. Something to systematize away. For many of the founders we talked to, that work is what's actually being purchased. The care, the handling, the embodied experience of the person doing it. Not a side benefit. The point.
This matters especially for clients who've been mishandled elsewhere. The thoughtfulness and dignity isn't a byproduct. It's the value. Some founders refuse to take on work outside their lived experience, unless someone on the project has that experience. They put the values into the project itself, not into a statement on a website.
Theme 4: The double weight of being held to a higher standard from both directions.
A pattern came up across multiple conversations. Queer-coded businesses get less room to make mistakes than their nonqueer counterparts.
From outside, behaviors that pass without comment at a non-queer business get amplified criticism at a queer-coded one. One founder described this as ultimately unsustainable for the long-term survival of queer spaces.
From inside, queer-marketed spaces are held as moral examples by their own communities. When they fall short, the disappointment is sharper. The community has fewer safe places to bring grievances, which then surface publicly. The pressure adds up from both sides at once.
There's a tension here that no founder in the sample had resolved cleanly. Public solidarity protects the sector from outside criticism. It can also let harm continue inside. Internal accountability addresses harm directly. Doing it publicly can be used against the whole community. Both options have real costs. Without a neutral place to
bring problems, founders are often stuck choosing between staying silent and going public.
Theme 5: Thin margins meet care-driven pricing.
Many of the founders we talked to are running on thinner margins than their nonqueer counterparts. Contributing factors may include less family wealth to draw from at the start, a customer base that often can't pay market rates, pricing that lowers fees for the community, or taking on work that by the hour doesn't make sense.
None of the founders we interviewed had accessed a regular small-business loan. Several had been operating for over a decade before getting their first grant.
Three different ways of making this work showed up across the conversations. Some founders charge premium clients more so community clients can be charged less, inside the same business. Some run a separate profitable business that funds the one they actually care about. Some take on a smaller number of well-paying long-term clients to make space for a larger volume of lower-rate community work. None of these founders called their workaround "strategy" at the time. Each described it as survival.
Theme 6: How founders find mentorship, connection, and each other.
The most useful peer support, those we interviewed identified, wasn't happening through formal mentorship programs. Several founders described feeling
intimidated by application-heavy, matchedpair structures. Others said they couldn't find their person through these traditional pathways.
What's working instead is informal. Small founder check-in groups of two or three people. Hundreds of "exploration calls" before launching. Loose relational pairings outside any formal program. Joint memberships across multiple groups that signal multiple commitments at once. The form is informal, relational, and self-organized. It works better than any structured mentorship.
Some founders have also explicitly built their offering across multiple communities at once. Queer and disability and racialized and neurodivergent communities, served as one offering rather than as separate single-identity brands.
PROVOCATIONS AND REFRAMES
The work of this project isn't just about documenting problems, it's about seeing them differently. The following provocations are offered not as conclusions but as invitations: ways of thinking about Queer and trans entrepreneurship that might challenge assumptions, open up new questions, and help us collectively imagine something better than what currently exists.
A Queer Entrepreneurship Journey
What does the arc of building a business actually look and feel like when you're Queer or trans? Not the sanitized version — the pitch deck, the growth chart, the exit strategy — but the real one, with all its emotional texture, structural friction, and hard-won meaning.
The framework below traces that journey from its earliest spark through to questions of legacy and letting go. It was developed through a combination of informal conversations with queer and trans entrepreneurs in Edmonton, a review of emerging literature on queer and feminist approaches to entrepreneurship,10, 11 and an iterative process of synthesis with an AI language model. It is not a definitive or exhaustive account but rather, offered as a reflective tool. Participants are invited to see themselves in it, push back against it, and reshape it with their own experience.
We offer it not as a universal map, but as a starting place for deepening our understanding of the Queer entrepreneurship
Spark & Becoming
Legitimacy & Belonging
Starting Out (or Starting Sideways)
Body, Energy & Space
Sustaining (and Surviving)
Money, Worth & Pricing
Growing (On Your Own Terms)
Navigating Power
Inflection & Transformation
Later, Legacy & Letting Go
Joy, Pleasure & Meaning
journey. These stages are best understood as cycles of experience rather than a linear path from point A to point B - recognizing that people may be moving through several cycles simultaneously, and that any cycle may be revisited or reshaped by lived experience.
Spark & Becoming
• The first flicker, a felt sense that something is possible before you have words for it
• Saying "I could do this" out loud for the first time, and what that feels like
• Desire as data, trusting an internal pull before you have external validation
• The tension between building something new and replicating the structures you're trying to escape
• "Coming out" as a business owner, especially when it disrupts expectations around stability or sellout-hood
What gave you permission to want this? Was there a moment, a person, or did it just insist on itself?
Legitimacy & Belonging
• Finding (or not finding) mentors or models who look like you and have built the kind of thing you want to build
• The first time someone questions your credibility in a way that feels identity-coded
• The imposter experience not just personally but structurally, being made to feel like you don't belong in rooms you've earned
• Deciding how visible your identity is in your work, and for whose comfort
Where did you find permission to take up space? And where are you still negotiating it?
Starting Out (or Starting Sideways)
• First exchange of value, which may not look like a traditional transaction
• Choosing a legal and financial structure without inherited templates or family capital
• Inheriting (or not inheriting) financial literacy, and the shame that can surround that gap
• Building early credibility without traditional networks or gatekeepers
What did you have to figure out on your own that others seemed to just know? Who or what filled that gap?
Body, Energy & Space
• Physical safety in workspaces, at markets, events, or client meetings
• The energy cost of code-switching or masking, and what it takes from the work
• Building or choosing spaces where you and your clients can actually exhale
• Rest as resistance, and the ongoing negotiation with hustle culture
What does it cost you to show up in certain spaces? And where do you get to just be?
Sustaining (and Surviving)
• The feast/famine cycle as a structural problem, not a personal failure
• Financial precarity as a political condition, not just a business stage
• Finding reciprocal community, not just networking but actual mutual support
• The loneliness of solopreneurship, especially when your work is community-facing but the building of it is done alone
• The role of chosen family or community in making the work possible, and the strain it can put on those relationships
What's actually holding this up? And what's the cost of that to the people holding it with you?
Money, Worth & Pricing
• The first time you raise your prices, and everything that surfaces emotionally
• Overcoming chronic undercharging shaped by internalized marginalization
• The tension between financial sustainability and the ethics of accumulation
• Accessing capital while navigating a funding landscape that wasn't designed for you
What's the story you carry about what your work is worth? Where did it come from?
Growing (On Your Own Terms)
• Questioning whether growth is even the goal, and what it's for
• First collaborator or hire, and the weight of being responsible for someone else's livelihood
• Building culture intentionally when the dominant models weren't built for bodies like yours
• Navigating collaborations that start as friendships, and what happens when they end
• Expanding beyond the community that supported you first, and what that costs
What does growth mean to you, and what are you not willing to sacrifice for it?
Navigating Power
• Moments of visibility and what they cost (press, platforms, being "the diverse voice")
• Being tokenized, co-opted, or flattened by mainstream interest
• Holding boundaries with clients, collaborators, or audiences who want your labor but not your politics
• Gatekeepers, and the choice to go around them, dismantle them, or ignore them entirely
• Shifting political conditions as real business variables, not just background noise
When has your visibility been used against you, or used by someone else? How did you respond?
Inflection & Transformation
• Burnout not as failure but as information
• Pivoting in response to personal shifts (health, relationship, identity evolution) not just market ones
• The moment you realize the business has outgrown its original container
• Grief for the version of the work or yourself you're leaving behind
• Recommitment, the conscious choice to keep going after a hard season, which is its own kind of founding moment
What has the business asked you to let go of? What have you refused to?
Later, Legacy & Letting Go
• Questioning the exit narrative, who benefits from acquisition or scale, and at what cost
• Succession without assuming there's an heir or a buyer
• Winding down with care, especially when the business holds community relationships and trust
• Legacy as ongoing relation, not monument
What do you want to leave behind, and for whom? What would it mean to let this go well?
• Celebration and the queer tradition of making joy under pressure
• The pleasure of building something that didn't exist before, on terms you chose
• Moments when the work, the identity, and the impact feel like one thing
• Collective joy as a generative force, not just a reward at the end of the hard part When does this feel like yours? What does it feel like when it does?
Entrepreneurship as Emancipation
Most mainstream narratives about entrepreneurship are built around opportunity — the gap in the market, the bold idea, the calculated risk taken from a position of relative security. For many Queer and trans people, that story doesn't fit.
Research consistently documents that 2SLGBTQIA+ people face significant discrimination in traditional employment — in hiring, in workplace culture, and in advancement. The Diversity Institute's 2022 report12 on access and equity for 2SLGBTQ+ businesses in Canada found that experiences of workplace discrimination are a meaningful driver of entrepreneurship within the community, as is the desire to build working environments that are affirming rather than
merely tolerable. The StartOut 2023 State of LGBTQ+ Entrepreneurship Report13 similarly found that many LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs cited exclusion from conventional workplaces as a factor in their decision to start a business.
In this light, entrepreneurship looks less like an opportunity seized and more like a freedom built — sometimes deliberately, sometimes out of necessity, often both at once. It is a way of refusing the terms on offer and constructing something new. The businesses Queer and trans entrepreneurs build often carry that origin in their DNA: they tend to be community-rooted, values-driven, and oriented toward creating the kind of affirming spaces their founders couldn't find elsewhere.
A note on sourcing: the framing of entrepreneurship as emancipation draws on the sources cited as well as the broader literature on necessity entrepreneurship among marginalized groups. It also reflects themes emerging from our own listening sessions. It is offered here as a generative lens, not a settled research finding — and we expect the journey mapping workshops to deepen and complicate it.
Redefining What Success Means
The dominant language of business success — growth, scale, profit, exit — was not designed with Queer and trans entrepreneurs in mind. It reflects a set of assumptions about what businesses are for, what
constitutes winning, and whose values get built into the infrastructure of commerce.
Many of the entrepreneurs we've been listening to are quietly — and sometimes not so quietly — refusing those terms. They are asking different questions: not just how do I grow but what is growth actually for. Not just what is my business worth but worth to whom, and by what measure. Not just what's my exit strategy but what does it mean to let something go in a way that honours the community it served?
These aren't just philosophical questions. They have practical implications for how businesses are structured, how success is measured, and what kinds of support and resources are actually useful to Queer and trans entrepreneurs. A funding landscape built around rapid growth and investor returns may be actively misaligned with the kinds of businesses many Queer and trans entrepreneurs want to build — businesses that prioritize sustainability, community benefit, and the wellbeing of the people doing the work.
Dr. Leanne Hedberg's research with the national Rainbow Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub14 is beginning to surface these tensions explicitly — interrogating the assumptions baked into mainstream entrepreneurship discourse and asking what a more expansive, community-centered definition of business success might look like. We think that's exactly the right question, and we're carrying it into the workshops.
10 Friedrich, J., & Steyaert, C. (2025). Emancipatory entrepreneuring as disidentification: A queer-feminist view of becoming a democratic cooperative. Human Relations, 78(6) https://doi. org/10.1177/00187267241302783
11 Kidney, E., Marlow, S., & Cooney, T. M. (n.d.). Everyday prejudices: An intersectional exploration of the experiences of lesbian and gay entrepreneurs. Dublin City University. https:// doras.dcu.ie/29507/3/Kidney%20et%20al..pdf
12 Diversity Institute (Toronto Metropolitan University). (2022). Access and equity for 2SLGBTQ+ businesses in Canada. https:// www.torontomu.ca/content/dam/diversity/ reports/Access-and-Equity-for-2SLGBTQBusinesses-in-Canada.pdf
13 StartOut. (2023). State of LGBTQ+ entrepreneurship report. https://startout.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/2023-State-of-LGBT Q-Entrepreneurship-Report.pdf
14 More on the Rainbow Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub here: https://www.rekh.ca/ rekhproject-team
WHAT’S NEXT: THE JOURNEY MAPPING WORKSHOPS
The listening sessions that informed this primer are just the beginning. What comes next is where the work gets collective.
The Workshops
We are bringing together Queer and trans entrepreneurs from across Edmonton for a series of journey mapping workshops — participatory sessions designed to go deeper into the experiences, barriers, and possibilities that the listening sessions have begun to surface. Rather than presenting findings to participants, these workshops invite participants to be co-investigators — to test, challenge, and build on what we're learning together.
A separate session will bring together businesses, service providers, and other stakeholders — sharing what we've heard from Queer and trans entrepreneurs and inviting the people and organizations who shape the business environment to engage with that knowledge directly.
What We Hope to Learn
The workshops are designed to help us map the entrepreneurial journey in greater detail — identifying not just where barriers exist, but where along the journey they hit hardest, what forms they take, and what conditions make them easier or harder to navigate. We're equally interested in moments of resilience, resourcefulness, and community support — the strategies and networks that help people keep going.
Where This Leads
What we learn in the workshops will feed directly into:
1. Resources and supports for Queer and trans entrepreneurs in Edmonton - though the exact form this takes will be guided by what we hear. We’re holding a few possibilities:
a. A practical resource guide that connects Queer and trans entrepreneurs to verified, relevant resources
a. A navigation support function that helps people find their way through funding, legal, and other systems that weren’t always designed with them in mind
a. Queer-specific programming that fills gaps where existing resources fall short or don’t speak to their lived experience
2. A set of policy and practice recommendations for the organizations, institutions, and systems that shape that landscape.
The goal is for both of these tools to be genuinely useful — grounded in real experience, responsive to the full diversity of the community, and built with Horizon 3 in view.
