'More than 10,000 Canadians participate in this walk to help fight global poverty'
Aleem Visram is excited about the World Partnership Walk that’s happening in Toronto and Vancouver this weekend because it’s one of the causes that this award-winning advisor serves.
“I’m on three boards at the moment,” Visram, who recently won The Edward Jones Award for Excellence in Philanthropy and Community Service, told Wealth Professional.
Visram is the owner of Toronto-based Transform Financial and co-owner of MIRFP Financial Planning, which has been in business for more than 25 years. He’s also serving as the national chair of marketing and communications for the Agha Khan Foundation’s walk this weekend.
“We’ve raised about $3.5 million and we typically raise between $5 and $7 million a year,” he said, noting they raised $5.7 million with a virtual walk last year and are excited about having their first in-person walk since 2019. Other events, such as a musical dance performance in Hamilton, are being held in other cities across Canada.
“More than 10,000 Canadians participate, and the walk is to help fight global poverty. Since 1985, we’ve raised $135 million, and all the funds go directly to the programs in education, health care, and rural and community development in the poorest regions of Asia and Africa. The good part is all the funds go directly to the charity because it’s run by volunteers. There are no overhead expenses.”
Visram traces his need to give back to how he was raised by his parents, who immigrated to Canada from Uganda in 1971 with only a suitcase and $20 when Idi Amin purged the country of Indians.
“They came with nothing in their pocket and they built a good life here. But, they raised me and my sister to give back and be involved,” he said. “They took me back to Africa and showed me the really poor village that they’d lived in. Ever since then I’ve always had this yearning to give back.”
That propensity was accentuated when he travelled in India with his sister in 2003, where he was overwhelmed by the amount of poverty. He started working with the Agha Khan Foundation in 2004, volunteering for the walk and doing an internship in Afghanistan to set up schools for girls in the poorest, most remote locations, where he saw how the programs helped. On his return, he became an ambassador for the Canadian International Development Association (CIDA) and visited Canadian universities, encouraging other students to do international development work.
Visram also serves on the board of the alumni association for his alma mater, the Richard Ivey School of Business, and helps to organize networking, entrepreneurship, and leadership events for it.
He’s a board member of Gilda’s Club Toronto, which provides social and psychosocial support and education for cancer patients and their families. He got involved after meeting a young mom who was a cancer survivor while they were at a golf tournament dinner. He was touched by her story because she had a five-year-old daughter, just like him, and she appreciated the club’s support.
“When I heard her story, I was, like, wow: that’s a great organization!”, said Visram.
In the winter, he also volunteers weekends in Caledon, north of Toronto, to teach disabled adults how to downhill ski and snowboard. He was excited about one woman, age 50, who teaches motivational speaking. She was a quadruple amputee, but he helped her learn to ski and she’s gone on to win a bronze medal at the Paralympics as well as participate in other sports.
Visram spent a decade in marketing – and has been teaching marketing at the Schulich School of Business at York University for 11 years – before joining his dad’s financial business, where he got his investment and insurance licensing. His dad’s now retired, but Visram has continued the business and recently rebranded it to Transform Financial. He has 1,000 insurance clients and 150 investment clients with $40 million of assets under management.
Asked how all this relates to his business, he said: “None of it does. It’s just what I do on the side because I like doing it. It’s required for me to give back and I think the award was really nice because I didn’t expect to receive it. It was nice to post about it and it’s given me some credibility in my business as well because a few people who saw it said, ‘this is so great. We want to work with you!’”
