BCBusiness
Alona Puehse, CEO of Open Door Group, is a winner in the Diversity and Inclusion Champion category of the 2025 Women of the Year Awards
Alona Puehse left the private sector to join the Vancouver-based nonprofit Open Door Group in 2009 when she saw firsthand how meaningful work can change somebody’s life. “I wanted to be part of something that was connecting people who often face barriers to employment,” Puehse recalls.
When Puehse became CEO in 2022, she continued to support thousands of individuals in B.C. on their search for fulfilling and sustainable employment. “I’ve seen it hundreds of times [during] my tenure at Open Door Group: when somebody is hired on for paid employment and they’re able to contribute their strengths and their skills, that has a profound impact on their lives; but it’s not just for the individuals, it’s also often the business that they’re going into,” she says.
Over the last eight years, Open Door Group has become one of the largest nonprofit employment service providers in the province, helping over 1,100 people find employment in fiscal 2023-2024. It also provides educational, mental health, wellness and community connection programs to roughly 8,000 clients every year—77 percent of whom belong to equity-deserving groups. “A lot of folks are coming from different identities, whether they’re newcomers, people with disabilities, single parents [or] somebody who is precariously housed,” Puehse says.
But the Open Door Group doesn’t just assist individuals. Puehse’s team has worked with over 400 employers to create more accessible, diverse and inclusive workplaces—including within their own organization. “For us to be able to deliver our services really well, accessibility, diversity, equity and inclusion is so important internally as an organization,” she says, adding that Open Door Group has implemented the Pledge to Measure initiative, an annual survey measuring disability representation.
For Puehse, being able to measure this change is an important part of equity and inclusion work, as is creating a safe environment for open conversations. “The approach that I saw when I was younger was: That’s just the way it is. You just kind of work through it, and you work around it,” she explains. But Puehse is heartened by the shifting perspectives around DEI, especially in B.C.
“Barriers don’t exist with a person, but rather within our systems, whether that’s access to health care, education, employment, our workplaces and so on,” she says. “The onus is on us collectively to identify and remove those [barriers] rather than the responsibility being [put] on individuals who are excluded.”
While the future of global DEI initiatives seems uncertain, Puehse says that B.C. remains strong because of its diversity. “It’s not about performative action,” she says. “It’s not about taking away something from a group of people. It’s around knowing that, for sustainable collective prosperity, we have to be brave enough and honest enough to acknowledge that we have to evolve our systems for all of us to thrive.”
Discover our full list of 21 BCBusiness 2025 Women of the Year award winners here.