When it comes to spotlighting how students are working to solve social problems, it is hard to find someone more dedicated than Megan MacLeod. Megan is a non-profit leader who has been working on clothing drives to serve her community since 2010.
Emily Bland and Neala Kielley are key members and alumni, respectively, of Enactus Memorial, a student-run organization based out of Memorial University of Newfoundland. Enactus Memorial starts projects that provide entrepreneurial solutions to global problems.
Three years ago, social innovator Caleb Grove was inspired to start his first entrepreneurship project before he left for Bambalang, a small rural community in the North-West region of Cameroon. Caleb recently completed a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering (BSc Mechanical) at the University of New Brunswick (UNB).
Green Cup is a new project started by post-secondary student Austin (Ozzy) Lang and co-founded by his colleague Emily Bartlett. This for-profit endeavour aims to make a positive impact on the environment by creating compostable coffee cups. Calgary does not currently have a compost system, so these cups are thrown out in bins labelled with the Green Cup logo and instructions for disposal.
To commemorate the first official Social Entrepreneurship Day in Calgary, Trico Charitable Foundation is pleased to announce $700,000 in local social entrepreneurship programming.
“The existence of the Social Entrepreneurship Day Proclamation as well as the wonderful sentiments it contains (the Proclamation is attached to this News Release) are a fitting testament to the extraordinary momentum Calgary is gathering as a hub for social entrepreneurship” says Dan Overall, Director of the Trico Charitable Foundation. “We are honoured to both celebrate and support that momentum with this commitment to our home city.”
ShelterBox was started in 2000 in the UK by an ex-military serviceman who had seen a need for shelter and supplies to be delivered to families effectively and immediately after a disaster. Since then, the organization has grown into a global leader in providing high-tech shelter solutions and supplies to families in over 100 countries around the world.
Our Q & A with Kody Baker, Founder and CTO of VeloMetro, discusses the founders’ social entrepreneurship journey, “Aha!” moments, the startup lifestyle, their vision that drives them, and much more.
It was an idea Julian Sharpe couldn’t let go – the devastation caused by the 2004 Mega Thrust Earthquake and Tsunami Wave in Indonesia. It didn’t help that the more research he did, the more he learned that this was a global issue, meaning it would happen again and in more places.
We are pleased to announce the five local social ventures that will be competing for $10,000 on September 16 as part of Social Entrepreneurship Day in Calgary (listed alphabetically):
Age-in-Place Laneway House
aGRO Systems
Bundles of Hope
Deepwater Farms
Green Cup
We ask the acclaimed author of “Lean Startups for Social Change: The Revolutionary Path to Big Impact”: What’s your elevator pitch on the promise and power of bringing lean startup thinking to the social sector?, What is typically the greatest challenge for social organizations as they try to use lean startup thinking? and Explain the idea of “the one metric that matters”?