Six social ventures, working in sectors ranging from healthcare to urban agriculture, were announced this week as the first selected to benefit from the Coast Capital Savings Innovation Hub at UBC’s Sauder School of Business.
Launched in September 2012 with a $1-million gift from Coast Capital Savings, the Innovation Hub supports early stage ventures devoted to solving social and environmental problems using for-profit business models.
Led by Sauder’s ISIS Research Centre, the initiative provides working space, mentoring from faculty, alumni and industry experts, and support from Sauder students paired with ventures as interns. The program aims to accelerate the growth of social ventures, helping them to create scalable and sustainable solutions to social and environmental problems in British Columbia.
The organizations selected for the program are:
Change Heroes: An online fundraising platform that helps people to engage their friends to fundraise for schools and libraries to support education in developing countries.
Connect Health: A pioneering model of integrative medicine, providing effective holistic care by combining the best conventional medicine and complementary approaches.
Shailah Interactive: An affordable gesture-controlled tablet and mobile educational games designed for children with physical disabilities who cannot use a touch screen.
Shift Urban Cargo Delivery: A company transforming goods movement in urban areas by using pedal powered trike vehicles for deliveries in the downtown core, eliminating congestion and pollution.
Green Challenge Waste Management: A waste and recycling management not-for-profit society that provides employment opportunities to people with barriers to employment.
Victory Gardens: An organization providing garden infrastructure for any kind of space, helping people rethink urban areas and bring food to where it didn’t exist before.
For more information, visit: http://www.sauder.ubc.ca