Honouring a loving father and ‘serial entrepreneur’

Fred Atiq was what his son Sikandar calls “a serial entrepreneur.” Emigrating from India to Canada at the age of 19, Fred pursued a diploma in engineering from NAIT — then spent the next 40-plus years building a family business empire from scratch.

“It was hustle from Day 1,” says Sikandar about his father. From manufacturing to venture capital investing to launching a multi-site child-care provider across Alberta, Fred and his family lived the entrepreneurial spirit.

It’s this spirit — and the strength to succeed as a young man from another country starting out here in the 1960s, in an atmosphere that wasn’t always welcoming — that Sikandar, his two sisters and his mother want to honour with two new awards for students in the Alberta School of Business at the University of Alberta.

All three of Fred’s children took his frequent messages about formal education to heart, and all three now have bachelor of commerce degrees from the U of A. It means the world to them, says Sikandar, to give to future generations in honour of their dad.

Since Fred’s passing in 2021, the Atiq family has learned much about his selflessness. “Old employees of his will tell us, ‘He helped me visit my family overseas, paying for my flights when my mother was sick’ … . So many of the people who knew him knew his generosity. But this is our chance to show who he was to people who had no idea who he was,” he says.

Two awards will be available from the Atiq Family Foundation starting next academic year for applicants from the School of Business. Both cover one year of tuition for the successful applicant, who must have demonstrated financial need and be a member of a visible minority or equity-deserving group. One of the awards is specifically for someone identifying as female, which was important to the family for personal as well as professional reasons.

“Both my sisters and my mother are entrepreneurs in their own right,” says Sikandar, and the family also saw how instrumental female business leaders have been in many of their ventures. They wanted to go some small way towards creating more parity in the local business ecosystem.

The Atiq family is driven by the conviction that supporting the education and growth of equity-deserving students will contribute to “uplifting the whole people,” in the words of the U of A’s first president, Henry Marshall Tory.

“When people are given equal opportunity, whether from a minority racial group or from a gender-parity perspective,” says Sikandar, “we’re unlocking so much more potential for us as a broader community."

When asked to imagine how his father might feel knowing there are now scholarships in his name, Sikandar pauses. “He didn’t really like being in the spotlight, so I can picture him saying, ‘Come on, guys, why is it under my name?’” he says with a laugh. “But at the same time, I’m sure he would really appreciate the fact that his legacy in the business world is living on in new ways.”