Jade Jager Clark Uses Her Diploma to Open Doors

What's she done? 

This Humber graduate is the founder and propulsive force behind Jade’s Hip Hop Academy, a prize-winning youth dance school of over 200 kids based in Brampton. She’s won the Harry Jerome Young Entrepreneur Award, acted as Director of the Dance Ontario Youth Board, staged bravura performances in some of Toronto’s most respected venues, represented Canada at the World Hip Hop Championships in Germany and is still just getting warmed up.

Having grown up in the Netherlands, Clark returned to Canada and eventually moved to Brampton to pursue Fashion Arts at Humber. Although she was accepted to prestigious institutes like Queens and the University of Toronto, she opted for Humber, the only place that really spoke to her passions. “I chose to follow my heart and pursue something I really wanted to do, plus Humber was the only school that combined both Fashion and Event Coordination and provided a hands-on program with rapid industry access (two internships in your second year) which is what you need to establish yourself in an industry such as Fashion,” Clark says.

While engaged in her studies at Humber, Clark dove into another one of her loves and opened up her Dance Academy. Looking back at the time, she’s not sure how she managed to balance everything, but she did, attributing much of her extracurricular business success to being able to implement the foundational lessons she learned while at work on her Fashion diploma. Her experience at Humber inspired her creative and business instincts and never confined her to just one career path but opened up the door to a multitude of possibilities that she’s been confidently progressing through ever since.

As Clark says, “Even though I transitioned full-time into entrepreneurship and dance after graduating, there were several business and creative aspects from the Fashion Arts program that I learned and still use today. That’s what makes this program so unique because by focusing equally on the business side of the industry, it gives so many more career options than programs just focused on design.”

Clark notes that the staff at Humber were incredibly invested in the success of their students. They weren’t burned-out drones but vivid and compassionate people sharing relevant, contemporary industry information, as well as the breadth of their experience to help ensure the success of their students, something that Jade now passes on to her own pupils at the Dance Academy.

The future is unwritten, but Clark wants to continue her career as a choreographer, expand the Academy, establish a fashion line, finish her University degree and eventually open a community arts school with a mandate to draw attention to world issues and inspire students to be the change that they seek.

For Clark, Humber helped to channel and then release both the creative and business sides that she had within herself, amplifying both opportunity and ambition. If ever Hollywood does come calling to make a film based on the life she’s forging, she’s the sort of woman who will almost certainly play herself, showing us that with the right foundation and drive, we really can become anything we want.

** This article originally appeared in be* Magazine in 2011