About Us

Each year, the Cansbridge Fellowship accepts a small cohort of Canadian university students with exceptional leader character to participate in a self-organized summer internship in Asia, enabled by a scholarship valued at $10,000. Fellows stretch their comfort zones, develop skills to collaborate cross-culturally, and build bridges to a world of opportunity.

Mission

Open Canadian students’ minds to a world of possibility through transformative experiential learning and a powerful network.

Vision

Create the top community of global leaders and innovators.

History

The Fellowship was founded in 2011 by William and Diana Yu, initially at Queen’s University. The program purpose was to promote understanding amongst Canadian students’ of the rapidly changing economic and geopolitical context in Asia, noting that future leaders must be able to collaborate, build, and innovate across borders. In the early years, there were more scholarships available than there were interested participants. Today, the Fellowship has an acceptance rate of under 2%, as approximately 1000 university students from across Canada apply for approximately 20 annual cohort positions.

Since then, the Fellowship has enabled unique international work experiences for over 200 Fellows. Furthermore, each fall during the Fellowship recruiting tour, Cansbridge inspires thousands more students to develop the awareness, entrepreneurial mindset, and global perspective to act boldly on their own curiosities.

As an organization with only one full-time staff, the Fellowship’s impact has always punched far above its weight due to the highly-engaged alumni community. All operations - from Recruitment and Selections, Onboarding and Conference Planning - are entirely alumni-run, and in 2023, alumni funded the majority of the Fellow cohort. The Fellowship was generously funded by the Yu family until 2018, when the Fellowship’s financial model expanded to include university, alumni, corporate, and government sponsors.