Social innovation student startups from an app that aggregates news stories and uses analytics to distill fact from opinion, to a program that will strengthen early childhood education in urban slums around the world are competing for $5,000 in funding from a new fund at St. Paul’s GreenHouse.
The live-in social innovation community at St. Paul's University College at the University of Waterloo will award $5,000 in funding to student innovators at the GreenHouse Social Innovation Showcase, taking place on Wednesday, December 3.
“There are huge problems that I didn’t believe could be solved by 22-year-olds,” says Hannah Furlong, a GreenHouse innovator. “Now, through GreenHouse. I can make a career out of a project with meaning like this.”
The projects vying for one of the grants are:
- IdeaSpace – Prianka Siva wants to create a social network so that the best ideas for social and environmental change don’t get lost in the discussion
- BabySteps Academy – Alisha Karmali and her team want to enhance early childhood education in urban slums
- Pan-Canadian University – Geoffrey Evamy Hill says students often attend university close to home, which deprives future leaders of a necessary understanding of the strengths of the regions of Canada; his new pan-Canadian program will solve that.
- Sitting is the New Smoking – Laura Barkin aims to make studying an active experience by bringing FitBikes to UWaterloo so they can exercise while studying
- RockStar Café – Hannah Furlong says today’s youth unemployment and environmental crises need a revolutionary solution, and revolutions start in cafés like the one she’s working on
- Water Epiphany – Samiya Hirji was washing dishes when she had an epiphany about how much water we mindlessly waste and what she could do to raise awareness and reduce water consumption on campus
- Civil News – In a world of thousands of news sources, how do you ever know whom to listen to? Kwame Ansong aims to cut through the chatter to get to the facts with his app.
The GreenHouse Social Innovation Showcase
Date: Wednesday, December 3
Time: 4-5:30 pm
Location: Alumni Hall, St. Paul's University College, 190 Westmount Rd N, Waterloo.
Registration for this free event is at greenhousefund.eventbrite.ca
