When Kelise Williams and her two small children arrived in Calgary from Trinidad and Tobago, she didn’t expect their first night to go the way it did.
“We were so unprepared,” Williams told CBC’s Radio Active of arriving with her family five years ago. “We basically spent our first night here in the lobby of a hotel.”
That experience led Williams to create UpRow, a settlement app that now serves more than 5,000 active users and is headquartered in Edmonton.
The app functions as a one-stop shop, directing newcomers to support for housing, language, tutoring, career coaching, shopping and even immigration lawyers and finance information.
It uses artificial intelligence to create a “recommendation engine” that offers solutions catered to each user’s needs.
Radio Active6:15Making the experience of moving to Canada easier
We hear about UpRow, a made-in-Edmonton app that helps newcomers settle in.
“It’s about settling safer and faster,” said Williams, who describes her own settlement experience as “rocky.”
When she volunteered with agencies in Alberta, like the Calgary Catholic Immigration Society and the Edmonton Mennonite Centre for Newcomers, she saw a bigger problem.
“Apart from being confused and feeling very overwhelmed with information, a lot of immigrants were falling victim to immigration fraud and fraud in general,” Williams said.
Scotiabank’s 2024 Fraud Poll revealed newcomers in Canada are more than twice as likely to fall prey to scams compared to others.
UpRow makes the navigation process easier but also connects newcomers to credible resources. All the service providers in the app are verified and go through background checks by Williams and her team.
The service started as a website, and UpRow officially launched on the Apple Store in March 2023. In 2024, Williams received $100,000 from the Edmonton Edge Fund.
As far as reviews? “I got off the phone this morning and someone said sliced bread has nothing on UpRow,” she said.
YEG roots for a national project
Williams wants the app to serve newcomers across Canada, but has a wide network of service providers in Edmonton. As she built UpRow she offered support to newcomers in the city, essentially beta testing the app in person.
Kimberly Jacob-Rambharose arrived in Edmonton in August 2022 and connected with Williams for support.
“I’m a planner, so I more or less did what I could do on my own,” she remembers.
She emigrated from Trinidad to attend the University of Alberta. Williams met her and her family at the airport, helping them with documents and groceries to get settled in their new home.
They became friends and Jacob-Rambharose did some testing and quality control before UpRow officially launched. She then used it for housing support, financial help and to set up utilities in their newly-purchased home.
“If you don’t know you just take whatever, the first person or thing you see,” said Jacob-Rambharose. With the app she had more information to make the right decisions.
“It makes things easier, like a one-stop shop thing.”
The community around the app has also supported her through these first years in Edmonton. The social media groups that have formed out of UpRow have become a resource for everything from taxes, to education and events.
“We’re solving a bigger problem which is the loneliness that newcomers feel,” said Williams. “We are creating a community around the concept of immigrants helping immigrants.”
Expanding resources, growing community
The app is expanding to better address barriers like language. In the coming weeks they will launch a tool that will allow newcomers to access the app in their chosen language, in addition to their language tutoring program which offers French and English support.
Later this fall Williams will head to AfroTech, a conference in the U.S. focused on Black STEM professionals and entrepreneurs to present UpRow.
She’s eager to share the app with other innovators and ensure newcomers don’t end up in a hotel lobby on their first night in a new place.
“It’s not going to be easy, it never is moving from one country to another,” said Williams. “But knowing what obstacles you’re going to face and having a community of people to support you makes the world of a difference.”
For more stories about the experiences of Black Canadians — from features on anti-Black racism to success stories from within the Black community — check out Being Black in Canada, a CBC project Black Canadians can be proud of. You can read more stories here.
