Each term, GreenHouse hosts the Social Impact Showcase to celebrate the amazing work on students in our community. Last week, thirteen teams pitched their ideas of social and environmental change and eight were awarded funding, including Science-led MycoNutrients and HUBour.
GreenHouse is a social impact incubator that offers programs, opportunities, and a community for students to develop problem solving skills, form innovative ideas, and make new forms of sustainable impact around social or environmental change.
The Social Impact Showcase celebrates the amazing work that GreenHouse students have accomplished throughout their social innovation journeys. This term, an outstanding 13 teams pitched and 8 teams were awarded funding to support their ventures from the Social Impact Fund, which helps GreenHouse students in advancing their ideas into action/supports the testing and development of early-stage, ideas from GreenHouse Innovators.
This term students broadly focused their ventures on food systems transformation, sustainability initiatives, and inclusivity. The 13 teams competing were: Foodage,Hope2love, HUBour, MedMelanin, MycoNutrients, NoSUP Canada, Operation Uphill Climb, Saree Switch, Save Environment Today, SproutMap, Sustainable Grow, The Chess Club and WatBikes.
Three Science-affiliated teams competed - MycroNutrients, HUBour and Saree Switch. Two teams won funding and MycoNutrients also won the People's Choice with their personal story of love and family.
MycoNutrients
The Indigenous-led business that provides functional mushroom products to support your well-being. The team is comprised of four Faculty of Science students - Evan VanderMeer (Biology), Saira Hadi (Biomedicine), Ryan Mitchell (Psychology SCI), Jonathan Chen (Biophysics). They are supervised by Dr. Bruce Reed, a professor in the Department of Biology and work in the lab space of Velocity Science.
The team was awarded $2,500 as well as the People's Choice Award, receiving more than 25 per cent of the 1,200 votes that came in and an extra $1,000 in funding to support their venture.
HUBour
The interdisciplinary team wants to help newcomers when they move to Canada. They won $1,500 for their community-driven platform that helps immigrants bridge the information and services gap when they immigrate to Canada.
The team members are: Kent Chin (Arts), Miley Xu (Environment), Leo Liu (Science and Business) and Geoffrey Qin (Engineering).
Saree Switch
Ravicha Ravinthiran, a fourth-year Science and Business student, is dedicated to empowering girls and young women. She created a marketplace to rent and purchase gently used South Asian clothing and jewellery. This business makes fashion sustainable, offers budget friendly merchandise and supports both buyers and sellers.
Congratulations to all the students who participated in the Fall 2022 Social Impact Showcase.