Representing Waterloo start-up EPOCH, students Jade Choy, Keith Choy, Lisa Tran, and Kaivalya Gandhi ranked among the top six teams in the $1 million Hult Prize Challenge at the United Nations in New York. The Challenge asked participants to find a sustainable, scalable social enterprise that could restore the rights and dignity of 10 million refugees by 2022.

EPOCH proposed an app that facilitates an exchange of talents and skills among refugees and community members through redeemable credits, a form of time banking where time is used as currency.

This has been an intense year full of growth and opportunity and we are eager to keep going,” said Jade Choy, co-founder of EPOCH. “We’ve been inspired by the refugees we’ve met who continue to pursue their dreams for themselves and their children despite their circumstances, and we want to create the kind of impact that allows them to restore their dignity.”

Prior to going to the Hult finals, the team won the UWaterloo Hult Prize competition in February, the Regional final in London, UK in March, and received the opportunity to participate in the world’s largest incubator for social enterprise in Boston, Massachusetts this past summer.

The team’s solution was inspired by their first-hand experience volunteering with refugees arriving in Kitchener-Waterloo, and has been shaped by many of the agencies working to help support and integrate newcomers into the community as well as the connections they have made with settlement agencies and businesses in Europe.

The EPOCH team received support from Waterloo’s Velocity program, the Conrad Centre, the[JF1]  School of Accounting and Finance, and the Epp Peach Incubator at Conrad Grebel’s Centre for Peace Advancement.

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