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Sushmitha Thirumalaivasan

Sushmitha Thirumalaivasan

Economic Development professional and Board Director at the City of Kitchener, serving as Downtown Development Officer; founder of SHE Immigrated.

Sep 3, 2026

8:49
Speaking of diving a little bit deeper, I'm curious with the project, looking back on it, whether it was the research or the design, what aspects of developing this program went particularly well? And were there any standout insights from surveys or your landscape analysis or even some of the stakeholder engagement that really helped you shape that final model? Or were the things that popped up where you're like, holy, I had no idea that that was actually a thing until you found it out through the data?
9:18
Yeah, for sure.
9:19
I could definitely hop onto that one.
9:21
I would say that one of our biggest strengths was the depth of research that our team committed to.
9:26
Even before trying to jump into solutions, we really wanted to analyze what the current landscape looks like.
9:32
So like Lauren mentioned, we did both primary and secondary research.
9:36
We did two surveys, one surveying economic development and trade organizations, and the second survey was for the businesses, trying to understand what current challenges are they currently facing.

10 MINS LATER

19:50
I'm curious, you know, what advice would you give to others, whether it's economic development officers or other chambers of commerce or different regions that want to pick up this idea and run with it and basically do their own interprovincial export circle cohort? What would you recommend to get them started? Other than listening to this episode, which is a great first step.

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