The two students who are part of a Workplace Innovation team at GreenHouse heard about GreenHouse through friends – a fellow Knowledge Integration student told Erin about opportunities to interact with experts in various fields, while Yulia attended a Social Impact Showcase at GreenHouse to support a friend’s venture. A fourth year Economics student, Yulia was intrigued by GreenHouse and began investigating joining the community.
Erin began at GreenHouse in winter 2019, working with a team interested in nutritional challenges for people with multiple sclerosis, while Yulia started by participating in a hackathon on lupus in the spring.
As both groups listened to the pain points of people with lived experience of the two diseases, they began to travel on parallel tracks, as they recognized the challenges of chronic health conditions.
“Without good health,” Yulia says, “you can’t work, can’t engage in many activities, and you experience big constraints in your life.”
They learned about the social safety net designed to help Ontario residents living with disabilities, the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP), but also about the challenges in navigating the system, with half of applicants being denied without explanation, even when they are qualified to receive support.
“I find it frustrating that this money exists to help people but they aren’t able to get access to it. There are unnecessary barriers to something that will significantly improve their quality of life.”
This fall, Erin, Yulia and their other partner, Chandu Subramaniam, came together to develop a solution to better connect people with disabilities with the support they need. ODSP and Me is a digital solution that streamlines and simplifies the process to improve accessibility to ODSP. The group often likens the app they are developing to a TurboTax program.
Left to right: Chandu Subramaniam, Erin Hogan, Yulia Li
The team was recently awarded $2000 through GreenHouse’s Social Impact Fund, these funds that will help them as they work on development, prototyping, and testing the app in the community.
“It’s exciting collaborating on this with a great team from different faculties,” Erin says. “It’s also been a chance to connect more deeply with lessons learned in the classroom, putting skills into practice.”
Congratulations to ODSP and Me for securing $2,000 in funding from the Social Impact Fund to further build and test its solution. Thank-you to Sanofi Genzyme for its generous support in sponsoring these funds to support youth-led innovation in the health and wellbeing space. Sanofi Genzyme’s financial contributions aim to make a positive impact on patients and communities globally.