When federal government employees were mandated back to the office in 2024, Mehnaz Tabassum and Saif Ahmed found themselves losing huge blocks of time to their commute – along with the energy for what mattered most to them.
“On a good day, it only takes 25 minutes from our house to downtown,” explained Tabassum, a senior IT project manager for the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat who is currently on a one-year leave. “But when the three days (in the office) started happening, it just got crazy.”
From the couple’s home near Hunt Club, Tabassum said the round-trip commute stretched to nearly four hours on the worst days, including the frustrating search for parking. At the end of in-office days, she and Ahmed, who works as a senior data scientist for Transport Canada and is also on leave, would sit in the library or at a café for an hour just to wait out the long queue of vehicles exiting the parkade.
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The married couple, who immigrated to Canada from Bangladesh, said the rigidity of in-office days also handcuffed their ability to dedicate energy to NL Eats, a food bank they launched during the pandemic that quickly grew into a nationally registered charity.
“Initially, the food bank started in our living room and our garage,” recalled Tabassum of the period in 2020 when she and Ahmed were living in St. John’s, Nfld., following their post-secondary studies. They moved to Ottawa in 2021. “A lot of restaurants and grocery stores were throwing out food because they were closing indefinitely; we collected everything, added our own funds and did crowdsourcing.”
Their initiative quickly gained traction, garnering media attention and support from the provincial government. Realizing the level of need in their community, the couple took advantage of their extra bandwidth – thanks to flexible, remote government work at the time – to further their cause.
“That flexibility allowed us to start a grassroots initiative and take it to the national level,” said Tabassum of NL Eats, which now comprises a 56-person team and more than 150 volunteers. Passionate about growing the momentum, Tabassum and Ahmed each embarked on a one-year unpaid leave from work in February 2025.
“We’re driven by impact,” reflected Ahmed. “Having so many people who believe in us and our mission and we’re not able to show up for them daily; it was time for us to take a step back (from government work) to understand how we can move things forward for the organization.”
Ahmed leveraged his network with Memorial University, which he established when he was completing a co-op term for his engineering degree, to involve engineering students with NL Eats.
“We were one of the first charities that had a huge technical team,” enthused Tabassum, adding that they replicated the university partnership model with several other Ontario universities, as well as Arizona State University and RMIT University in Australia. “We started implementing AI within our non-profit organization because many of our board members were working full-time. We started mapping some of our processes and implementing workflow automation.”
The couple soon realized that there was a major gap in the adoption of AI by non-profit organizations. It prompted them to launch CogniCo AI Consulting with the mission of helping other organizations adopt AI and automation to work smarter.
“We saw there’s a huge market for it. Non-profits and charities aren’t using AI effectively and many don’t even know the potential benefits,” explained Tabassum. “For organizations that are heavily underfunded, very reliant on grants or donations, if you can automate a workflow that saves some resources – people can focus that time into other impactful work.”
Today, Tabassum and Ahmed are utilizing AI to further grow their efforts with NL Eats. They host an annual conference, now in its fifth year, to bring youth and experts from the food industry together to discuss future-ready food systems.
“The main goal of the Food Forward conference is to break down the barriers between community members, young people, policymakers and industry experts,” said Tabassum, adding that Ranveer Chandra, the chief technology officer of Agri-food Microsoft, was one of the featured speakers last year. “We also launched a high school program where we teach young kids about nutrition and food insecurity.”
With studies indicating a major gap in employment within the agriculture sector by 2030, Tabassum said there is a need to empower more youth to pursue careers in agriculture. As she looks back on her journey with Ahmed, she shared that stepping away from her secure government job felt risky, but she has gained so much in the process.
“I think the biggest lesson is that you can always rebuild yourself,” said Tabassum. “When we left our government positions, we were very scared. But the more we are looking into opportunity, we are finding opportunity.
“There are diverse things we can do with our life; it doesn’t have to be one way.”
