Janelle Hinds

Janelle Hinds is the founder of Helping Hands, a platform to help youth volunteer and get civically engaged while building skills for their future careers. She delivers workshops to newcomer and racialized youth to build leadership skills and more to ensure all youth are active citizens. Helping Hands provides ongoing mentorship to youth, is creating systemic change to encourage youth participation in various levels of government, sharing stories of young changemakers to encourage other youth and change the narrative, and supporting young entrepreneurs to find funding and grow their efforts.

Janelle is an advocate for social innovation and encouraging others to pursue entrepreneurial endeavours. While working on her Bachelors of Engineering with majors in both Biomedical and Electrical Engineering, Janelle realized her passion for STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) education, entrepreneurship and diversity issues. She founded HackItMac (now known as PhaseOne), a collaborative community to learn about technology and organized deltaHacks, one of the first student-run hackathon in North America with a focus on enabling positive social change.

She has worked on integrating efforts to increase diversity in many of her endeavours and always looking for more opportunities to help others in their efforts. She is a leading Diversity Equity and Inclusion advocate and consultant helping organizations create inclusive workforces, products and services.

Janelle has met with various figures including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Netherlands Mark Rutte, Senator Wanda Thomas Bernard and Prince Charles and Duchess Camilla. She was recently awarded Forbes 30 Under 30 as the only Canadian for Education, as well as United Way of Greater Toronto’s Youth Leadership Award, Samara’s Everyday Political Citizen Award and Dutch organization Inspiring Fifty’s Top Women in Technology and Innovation. She a fellow for Institute for Canadian Citizenship and CivicAction’s DiverseCity.