The founder of Student Support, Ajamu Attard, came from humble beginnings. Having found himself homeless at the age of 16, he managed to turn his life around by leveraging the help offered to him by his community.
“They gave me a lifeline, and I took it,” says Attard.
“They paid for my mental health support, they took me in, they nurtured my talent and they saw my potential,” says Attard.
Now Ajamy Attard is giving back, and he’s doing it on a massive scale. He’s helped change the lives of thousands of students across Canada through his organization, Student Support, which makes essential services accessible to post-secondary students.
“Community is everything to me,” says Attard, who serves as the National Director and CEO of Student Support. Not only does the organization make essential mental health, academic support and fitness services available to students, but it does so for a fraction of what it would usually cost.
“It’s up to 98 percent off,” says Attard. Students are able to access a range of services such as Calm, Udemy, Nimbus Learning, Aaptiv and more for less than $50 per year.
“I thought look – what if the average student got the support that I got? How different would the world be and how far would people go?”
Attard says, “When I was looking at my peers, I noticed they didn’t have the same support that I had. I knew that they wanted that extra mental health, writing and fitness support. They wanted that guidance and they needed it.”
“Being a student isn’t just about doing homework. It’s about becoming a resilient citizen,” he says.
Attard remembers the time before he became an entrepreneur precisely: “I wanted security and I wanted to do the nine to five thing. I even turned down some incredible job offers to work in a bank, to be part of a software company.”
It was his mission to make a difference that pushed him over the edge and prompted him to take the plunge into making Student Support a success. Once he made that decision, he never turned back, and he’s proud of that decision today.
Attard says he knew it was his calling to help students because teachers and mentors from his past started sending students his way so that he could help them.
“Every student that I helped, their lives improved – they got a job, they went to university, their health improved or they got a scholarship. That was when I realized I could really make an impact and that I could really do something.”
“What happened to me was a miracle and I wanted to do that for someone else.”
When we asked Ajamu Attard to summarize in one sentence what Student Support is all about, he answered with this: “It’s about making sure that miracles don’t need to happen any more for people to get the support they need.”
Visit the Student Support website to learn more about Ajamu Attard and what his team is doing to help students get the access to support they need across Canada. In the future, their team hopes to bring health and care therapy, internet and phone plans, skills for the job market, financial literacy, meaningful jobs and moving services to the mix.
“This is just the beginning.”
