City of Mississauga offering support for businesses to recover from COVID-19

If you’re a business owner still struggling with the effects of the pandemic, the City of Mississauga is offering a number of valuable tools and support options to help you out.

Check out The City’s Economic Development Office (EDO) Economic Recovery Plan (ERP) Implementation, which outlines everything that’s been done (and everything that’s still underway!) to provide Mississauga businesses with the support they need.

“The COVID-19 pandemic is transforming how we think about our economic recovery and growth,” said Bonnie Brown, Director of Economic Development.

“While our collective resilience and innovative capacity have led to a strong recovery, we recognize that it has been a challenging journey for our businesses and entrepreneurs and we are not through this yet.”

Throughout the pandemic, a number of successful programs and initiatives were introduced – including #MississaugaMade, an online resource built to catalog local Mississauga products, businesses, artists and more to make it easy for the community to shop and support local.

#MississaugaMade lets you get your business’ name out there by simply listing it on the directory, as well as have the city potentially promote it via social media. To date, more than 710 businesses have registered, with more being added regularly.

To help businesses and entrepreneurs adapt to the more digital lifestyle brought on by the pandemic, the Digital Main Street initiative has helped over 245 small businesses adopt digital tools and technologies to build an online presence and grow their business. One of those tools, ShopHERE, helps you quickly and easily shift your business online and start selling through a digital platform.

Since workforce challenges are also affecting a lot of small businesses, EDO is working to connect post-secondary graduates with Mississauga businesses — helping new graduates, students and workers transition to local opportunities.

To that end, EDO created the Training and Hiring page on its website to help residents and businesses access training and education programs, hiring and onboarding programs, and other valuable resources.

In February 2020, the City also hosted the Building Skilled Talent Together (BSTT) event. BSTT is an initiative that focuses on developing concrete actionable solutions to the skills gap challenges and the difficulty manufacturers have in filling technical occupations. The event attracted over 100 participants.

Workforce development efforts have also continued with an increased focus on inclusive recovery initiatives, including Women in Mississauga Manufacturing and Life Sciences Equity and Diversity Collaborative. The goal is to increase gender balance, diversity, and inclusion of underrepresented populations in the workforce.

At the outset of the pandemic, EDO communicated with the Mississauga Business Community through many outreach and communication methods, including 12 roundtable sessions which represented a combined total of 22,000+ employees and resolved over 200 issues and inquiries.

Businesses also stepped up to help each other out during the pandemic, shifting their operations to help with the fight against COVID-19.

“We witnessed business leaders coming together to support one another, from access to Personal Protection Equipment, to solving operational issues, to donations to healthcare workers and the community. It was inspiring to witness acts of kindness and humanity in a time of crisis and uncertainty,” said Brown.

As Mississauga’s economic recovery progresses, the EDO team with the support of Council and key partners will continue efforts to support economic prosperity across the city.

More relief programs and helpful tools are available via the COVID-19 Business Resource Centre and COVID-19 Business Relief Portal.

To read the full report, click here.

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