The group of social ventures at the Coast Capital Savings Innovation Hub are incredibly unique and helping to make the world a better place. But don’t take our word for it. We reached out to each of them to find out a bit more about their venture and hear about what they’ll do with the Coast Capital Savings Propeller Prize.
The scoop on the Propeller Prize.
Recently, we awarded each of the ventures with a $2,000 Propeller Prize. Ventures can use the funds where they need it most to support their start-ups.
Get to know the Ventures!
What’s your venture all about?
The Alinker Inventions manufactures and sells the coolest walking bike for people who want to stay active but need walking assistance. In our users’ words, the Alinker represents freedom, independence, and social inclusion, and they can’t help but smile because it is so much fun! Our mission at The Alinker is to build an inclusive community and to become a vehicle for social change, challenging assumptions about people with mobility challenges. After all, every one of us will get old someday but, instead of dreading what’s to come, we can look forward to rocking it in Alinker Mode!
What does the $2,000 Propeller Prize mean to you? How is it going to help you?
We have used the $2,000 towards our new website which has just launched.
How has the Coast Capital Savings Innovation Hub helped your venture?
It gave us a home and was critical in helping us build and structure the company, gave us colleagues and a sound board.
What’s been the best part about participating in the Innovation Hub?
Feeling supported and the sense of having more colleagues who are in similar businesses. Learning and sharing information. The program helped us by providing space and community through which to meet advisors, entrepreneurs and the support to take our business to the next level.
What’s your venture all about?
Awake Labs is dedicated to empowering people living with mental health disorders. Our first product, Reveal, is a tool to measure and track anxiety for people with autism, in order to provide insight into care, increase learning and growing opportunities, and promote long term independence through self-regulation.
Reveal is based on a wearable that measures heart rate, skin temperature, and electrodermal activity (sweat). It is combined with a supporting application that allows parents, caregivers, and users to input contextual information. The physiological and contextual data will be analyzed using adaptive machine learning algorithms, in order to create the most complete and personalized profile of anxiety for each user.
What does the $2,000 Propeller Prize mean to you? How is it going to help you?
The prize from Coast Capital Savings will go a long way to help our venture. We’re currently running a co-creation study with 78 families in the Lower Mainland in which we are collecting data to build our algorithms, and receiving valuable feedback on how to improve the design of Reveal. The $2,000 from Coast Capital Savings is helping offset some of the equipment and travel costs associated with this study.
How has the Coast Capital Savings Innovation Hub helped your venture?
Over the summer, Coast Capital Savings sponsored our venture to hire an intern. The tremendous work put in by Katie Verigin was paramount to the progress we made this summer. We have the CCS iHub to thank for giving us the opportunity to bring Katie onto our team.
What’s been the best part about participating in the Innovation Hub?
The best part about participating in the iHub has been to join a group of like-minded individuals who are all working towards having an impact in their world. To be exposed to hard-working, genuine, and caring people has supported us through the many challenges we’ve faced, and those we will continue to encounter. Special shout out to Barb & Cindy from the Alinker for always giving us a reason to smile.
What’s your venture all about?
My Green Space™ is a mobile app that helps anyone grow their own food with confidence, in any space. We are on a mission to help millions of people experience the benefits of gardening. Our vision: A garden in every home, school, office and rooftop on earth.
The app is a master gardener in your pocket. Customized garden planning within minutes, tailored to your unique conditions. Visual garden map, automated companion planting algorithm, intelligent maintenance reminders of when to plant, water, thin, and successfully harvest. Rapid troubleshooting, nipping any pests and diseases in seconds, and exclusive educational content. Our app is the go-to project management tool, a rich distribution channel for gardening information, e-commerce purchases that match your needs, and community engagement.
What does the $2,000 Propeller Prize mean to you? How is it going to help you?
We will be using the funds on some critically needed innovation. We saw that garden planter boxes were not meeting the needs of our target customers, nor were they sustainably produced. Our millennial customers value function, aesthetics and a minimized carbon footprint.
Thanks to Coast Capital Savings, we were able to design and build our own locally sourced and produced line of small space planter boxes. The prototyping for this was quite expensive and the Propeller Prize helped us bring the planters to market.
How has the Coast Capital Savings Innovation Hub helped your venture?
The iHub has been instrumental in our growth as a team and a business. Compared to most incubators/accelerators where programs run 3-6 months, this program is a year long. It allowed our team the runway to settle down and get to work. The focus on social impact supported our purpose-driven approach and allowed us to hold on to our values as we continued to build our business.
What’s been the best part about participating in the Innovation Hub?
The iHub’s personal and professional leadership development courses were a highlight. We worked with talented coaches and the impact on our team has been amazing. We play to our strengths, communicate better, and have a continual awareness of the company culture we want to create and uphold as we expand.
What’s your venture all about?
Shanti Uganda is eradicating preventable maternal mortality throughout Uganda using a unique collaborative care model based on the midwifery model of care. Our Birth House merges modern best practices with traditional knowledge by uniting registered Ugandan Midwives as primary care providers and Traditional Birth Attendants as prenatal educators, doulas and breastfeeding educators in a full service care model throughout pre-pregnancy, birth & postpartum.
We’re a registered Canadian Charity, Ugandan NGO and registered Health Facility through the Ministry of Health in Uganda.
To date, we have supported over 900 births and our maternal mortality rate remains zero. We’re currently in the planning stages of establishing a midwifery training school in Uganda to expand our model of care throughout East Africa and generate a sustainable source of revenue for our programs.
What does the $2,000 Propeller Prize mean to you? How is it going to help you?
This year, Shanti Uganda was accepted into the GE Miller Centre for Social Enterprise Healthymagination Mother & Child Program. It is a 6 month accelerator program for organizations that improve infant and maternal health in Sub Saharan Africa. The program began with a kick-off event in Nairobi Kenya in July 2016 and the $2,000 Coast Capital Savings prize money went towards our plane ticket to Nairobi. The program ends in February 2017 with a pitch to impact investors in Nairobi, Kenya.
How has the Coast Capital Savings Innovation Hub helped your venture?
To date, we have benefited from regular workshops and mentorship with industry experts, ongoing support from iHub staff, a full time summer communications intern and support with our internal operations, strategy and financial management. Whether receiving support for our strategic planning weekend, or simply having someone to review and give feedback on a presentation, it has been a fabulous experience and one we are extremely grateful for.
What’s been the best part about participating in the Innovation Hub?
The mentorship we have received from both the iHub mentors and staff has been invaluable. Having someone there to both celebrate our successes and encourage us through our challenges is incredibly helpful.
What’s your venture all about?
The Good Stuff exists to make good, healthy food easy. To do that, we bring ready-to-blend super-food smoothies direct to your door. We source local/organic, craft recipes with a dietitian, and deliver throughout Vancouver.
What does the $2,000 Propeller Prize mean to you? How is it going to help you?
We used the $2,000 to purchase a new heat sealer for our product. This helped to drastically improve our production process and ultimately scale up!
How has the Coast Capital Savings Innovation Hub helped your venture?
The iHub helped us in a few big ways:
Mentorship. They connected us to leaders in our field who have pushed us on our strategy, business model, and more. Their guidance has been extremely valuable. In fact, we have recently created a company Advisory Board and two of the four members are from the iHub.
Resources. iHub provided us with office space, a co-op student, and a plug-and-go business network. All three of those allowed us to grow much faster than we ever could have on our own.
What’s been the best part about participating in the Innovation Hub?
The things listed above have been the most beneficial to our business. But my personal favourite part is the cohort of other participating entrepreneurs you meet in the program. In the sometimes trying entrepreneurial journey, it is powerful to be surrounded by a group of like-minded peers.
Having others there to talk about social impact with, share challenges and wins, and share this fundamental experience with was transformative for us in the early stages of growing our business.
One year ago, we were deciding whether or not to go full-time with The Good Stuff. The iHub was the perfect platform for us to make that leap.
What’s your venture all about?
Grocery stores are big business. The vast majority of food they sell is grown farm from where we live by people we’ll never meet. It’s anonymous and its history uncertain. Why would anyone want to put that in their mouth or feed it to their children? At Urban Digs we are farmers first, and it takes one to know one. We supply families and chefs with trustworthy meat, eggs and produce grown at our farm and by other farmers we know. Our collective humanity is reflected in how our food is raised and nurtured. Be it soil or feed, we are ultimately what the vegetables and animals eat. We help people know their food so they can make informed choices that reflect their values.
What does the $2,000 Propeller Prize mean to you? How is it going to help you?
The $2,000 prize from Coast Capital Savings has helped us keep our MBA intern on part-time to continue the important work she started over the summer. This has enable us to integrate her work into our day-to-day operations as she continues to work closely with our office manager.
How has the Coast Capital Savings Innovation Hub helped your venture?
The Coast Capital Savings Innovation Hub has helped us to build resilience into our business model that will help us to grow as we transition out of the start-up phase.
What’s been the best part about participating in the Innovation Hub?
The best part about participating in the iHub is having the support of a team who is dedicated to helping us look at the big picture. It’s easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day operations which can seem overwhelming at times. The iHub has helped to keep us focused on the things we need to do to move forward… not just the things we need to do to get through another day.
Do you have a social venture idea but need some help to get it off the ground? Learn more about joining the Coast Capital Savings Innovation Hub. Applications are being accepted until November 6, 2016.
