WEcast - Supporting Women Entrepreneurs in Southern Alberta

As the WESTEM program comes to an end, we are excited to welcome Dr. Christy Lane as our final guest for WEcast. Dr. Christy Lane is a Startup Founder and award-winning exercise scientist with expertise in big data, wearable devices, and digital health. She has won many international awards for her work in lifestyle medicine and the application of technology in health.  Dr. Lane is the Chair of Health and Physical Education at Mount Royal University and a founding member of the Stanford Wearable Health Lab. She is also the Founder of Vivametrica, a health tech company that uses data from wearable devices to predict mortality and disease risks, as well as to engage individuals in wellness. Dr. Lane has a PhD in Rehabilitation Medicine, and has focused her career around the measurement of physical activity, and promoting exercise as medicine for clinical populations. She is particularly interested in the capabilities of wearable technology for promoting lifestyle behaviour change. She has been recognized as Avenue Calgary's Top 40 Under 40, Top 20 Women in Tech 2018, and was awarded the Mount Royal University Research Excellence Award in 2019.

Links mentioned in this episode:

Dr. Christy Lane – LinkedIn

https://ca.linkedin.com/in/christyclane

Top 40 Under 40

https://www.avenuecalgary.com/top-40-under-40/2018/dr-christy-lane/

Mount Royal University Research in Excellence

https://www.mtroyal.ca/Research/FundingAwards/RRA-archive.htm

Vivametrica

https://www.vivametrica.com

The 51

https://the51.com/

Plug and Play

https://www.plugandplaytechcenter.com/

Silicon Valley of the North

https://technologyalberta.com/?p=3449

Creative Destruction Labs

https://creativedestructionlab.com/

Platform Calgary

https://www.platformcalgary.com/

Thin Air Labs

https://www.thinairlabs.ca/

Spring has sprung at WEcast! To kick off our Spring 2022 series, we invite Keri Drennan, P.Eng, and founder of Impact Leader to chat with us!

Keri is also a business advisor (with the WESTEM program as one example), an entrepreneurial coach and is passionate about engaging and inspiring people to think outside of the box.  She is a professional Engineer with 24 years of progressive leadership experience in business and she will tell you that she owes her success to building relationships and shifting cultures and paradigms.

Keri has expertise in integrating cultures through transformative leadership and change management.  Being authentic, a great communicator and tough when required, she has successfully transitioned her teams through a variety of mergers and acquisitions.

Keri transitioned from engineering and started Impact Leader in 2018, inspired by her aspiration to live in a world that is inclusive, engaging and inspiring.  Keri believes that everyone deserves to work in a trusting, respectful culture that includes maximizing business goals while having fun

A current focus for Keri is coaching women entrepreneurs in STEM, and her ability to relate and hold people accountable has aided in her success.

Links mentioned in this episode:

Impact Leader: https://impactleader.ca/

Lumina Spark: https://www.luminalearning.com/partners/latvia-riga/en/Spark

Regional Innovation Network of Southern Alberta (RINSA): https://rinsa.ca/

For our 3rd episode of our 3rd season we are very excited today to welcome Roxanne Doerksen CEO, T.R.A.D Worm Industries LTD.

Roxanne grew up a farm girl and has a strong connection with the land therefore protecting the land by keeping compostable refuse out of landfill was a 'no-brainer' for her.  She and her family had an amazingly horrible opportunity presented to them as a family when her daughter was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. At the time they decided that they could try to figure out a way of doing things better or could drown underneath the weight of her sickness. And that is where TRAD was born. Roxanne’s initial business concept was to produce worm castings, or manure, as a soil amendment to support the medical cannabis industry, but her plan took a turn when local growers and residential households started contacting her about how to set up their own worm farms and has since morphed into a leap of faith that embraces the knowledge that we are meant to be good stewards of our earth.

Pressure, and overcoming challenges, are nothing new to Roxanne. She returned to college as a mature student and launched a start up with no business background, but found the knowledge, skills and confidence she needed to succeed at both business and school.

Other than all of this, Roxanne thinks that worms are pretty awesome!

“Worms are more powerful than the African Elephant and are more important to the economy than the cow” - Charles Darwin

Links mentioned in this episode:

T.R.A.D. Worm Industries - https://www.tradwormindustries.com/about

APEX Alberta - https://www.apexalberta.ca/

T.R.A.D. in the News:

https://www.mhc.ab.ca/real/2020Spring_RDoerksen

https://medicinehatnews.com/news/local-news/2021/07/24/worming-her-way-to-the-top-doerksen-developed-her-business-from-the-ground-up/

https://bowislandcommentator.com/news/2021/03/17/t-r-a-d-worm-industries-focuses-on-soil-condition-improvements/

https://www.pressreader.com/canada/prairie-post-east-edition/20180622/281625306029494

In the second episode of our Winter series, we chat with founder and master beekeeper of ABC Bees, Eliese Watson.  Since its founding in 2010 ABC Bees has become the leading beekeeping education company in Canada. Over her career, Eliese has taught beekeeping across North America, been featured in Forbes Magazine, and has represented small scale beekeepers to the Canadian Senate. Eliese has developed strong beginner, intermediate, and advanced beekeeping programming that have been shared with thousands of students. Eliese also teaches small-scale apiary production in a 5-week course online to other farmers, hobbyists, and enthusiasts from around the world through the Level One Beekeeping Course.

Eliese is an educator at heart, but beekeeping is her passion. She maintains tight management practices with her colonies and includes diverse stocks in her apiary.  This is an effort to breed quality queens for the prairie climate and resilient survival stocks for treatment-free management and her experience in ethical and caring management of queens is expansive.

Through ABC Bees, she runs conservation programming for children, community associations, and private organizations. Eliese has also published four books engaging the public about bees; the trilogy Little Bees On Bees: “Solitary Bees”, “Bumble Bees”, “Gardening for Bees”, and a book for teachers use while educating children about the importance of bees, titled “Bee Inspired: Teaching Resource.”

Website: https://abcbees.ca/

Forbes Article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/eshachhabra/2017/03/31/this-female-founder-is-bringing-bees-back-to-calgary-and-rethinking-honey-production/?sh=1e00c60ce1b3

Published Books: https://abcbees.ca/our-books/

Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP): https://nrc.canada.ca/en/support-technology-innovation/about-nrc-industrial-research-assistance-program

Fun Fact:

According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way that a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its large body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyway because bees don't care what humans think is impossible.

Welcome to Season 3 of WEcast! We kick off 2022 with Stella Sehn as we discuss social entrepreneurship, facing obstacles head-on and her dedication to the Truth and Reconciliation of Canada’s Calls to Action. Stella is a super-mom of three, and she started the 100 % family owned and operated Bee Farm, “Sweet Pure Honey Bee Farm” from scratch with her husband and partner, Sheldon in 2016.   Together they make Canadian hand crafted, handmade, organic, No. 1 Raw White Honey, Beeswax Candles and lip balms using the abundance of healthy crops and wildflowers which surround their prairie farm.  It is important to Stella to have her children see that it's possible to run a business with values – such as respect for employees and the environment – that provides customers with special products and sustains their family.

Stella and Sweet Pure Honey were the Winners of the 2016 Chamber of Commerce Business Ethics Award presented by the Better Business Bureau.  Stella is also an international exporter, distributes honey nationally, is an innovator and social entrepreneur. You can also learn more about Stella and Sweet Pure Honey on Food Power Tv, where they were recently featured.

Sweet Pure Honey website: https://www.sweetpurehoney.ca/

Food Power TV: https://www.instagram.com/foodpowertv/

For our last episode before the Christmas break, we invite student entrepreneurs Lisa Marie Swanepoel and Julia St. Amand to talk about how they’re starting their own businesses while enrolled as full-time students.

Lisa-Marie was born in South Africa and moved to Canada at the age of 10. Her life-long passion for health and well-being has led her to pursue education in public health. She graduated with a Bachelor’s in Public Health from the University of Lethbridge in 2016 and is currently in the final stages of completing her Master of Science in Health Sciences. Lisa-Marie’s entrepreneurship journey started in 2018 with a team of 4. She took part in Craig Elias’s 150 Start-up event where she received an award for her team’s business idea. She has also been awarded the Alberta Innovates seed award. Lisa-Marie and her team are now in the process of preparing to launch their business called Needly. Needly is an app that aims to reduce inefficiencies with needle collection in communities and to keep cities safe.

Julia is an undergraduate student in the dual degree Kinesiology and Business program at the University of Calgary, with a passion for human physiology and social entrepreneurship. She first got involved in entrepreneurship at a healthcare hackathon called Innovation 4 health while working on software to predict bottlenecks in emergency departments.   She worked as a pharmacy assistant, contract analyst, and in software sourcing before leaving her position to pursue her business, RetinaLogik, full time.

Links mentioned in this episode:

Needly: https://www.needly.ca/

RetinaLogik: https://www.retinalogik.com/

Innovation for Health: https://www.innovation4health.com/

Hackathon: https://www.hackathon.com/event/student-startup-success-43333924936

150 Startups: https://150startups.com/

HackIT: https://www.alberta.ca/hackit-ab-innovation-hackathon.aspx

University of Calgary: https://www.ucalgary.ca/

University of Lethbridge: https://www.ulethbridge.ca/welcome-university-lethbridge

World’s Challenge Challege: https://www.ucalgary.ca/international/study-abroad/worlds-challenge-challenge

Hunter Hub: https://www.ucalgary.ca/hunter-hub

League of Innovators: https://www.theleagueofinnovators.org/

Campus Alberta Neuroscience: https://www.albertaneuro.ca/

Mitacs Programs for Student Entrepreneur: https://www.mitacs.ca/en

As we continue with our Fall series, we invite Dr. Mishka Singh to talk about her education, what she’s passionate about and her entrepreneurial journey. Mishka Singh is a South African born family physician who enjoys working with a diverse range of patients within the population she serves.  She graduated in 2010 from the University of KwaZulu Natal, Nelson Mandela School of Medicine in South Africa.  Whilst working in South Africa she worked in trauma, emergency medicine and obstetrics.  She moved to Canada in 2015 and has since completed all of her Canadian licencing exams as well as the exams of the College of Family Physicians Canada.  She currently serves a full panel of patients within the Lethbridge community.  She enjoys community service and just recently returned from a trip abroad volunteering with Kitrinos Healthcare at a refugee camp in Lesvos, Greece. Dr. Singh realises that technology is the way of the future which motivated  her to complete a few short courses on Artificial Intelligence in Health Care through MIT and Harvard. She endeavours to continue to improve her skills in her field to continue to help the community she serves.

Links mentioned in this episode:

https://chinookprimarycarenetwork.ab.ca/clinic/Campbell-Clinic-South

https://www.kitrinoshealthcare.org/

Shohreh Roshani was born to an Azerbaijani family in Iran, and Azerbaijani’s language, music and culture are very different from the majority of people in Iran. For the first 5 years of her life she lived in a small town in the Azerbaijan part of Iran, among very high mountains with harsh winters that last 8 months of the year.

Shohreh then lived in Tehran from the ages of 5 to 23, and when she was 7 years old Muslim extremists came to power in Iran. Since Shohreh and her family were not Muslim and belonged to the Baha’i Faith, this change of government altered her family’s and her community’s lives. Shohreh’s cousin, Ruhi Roshani, was kidnapped and murdered by the extremists at the beginning of the revolution in Iran, and a year later her uncle, Dr. Masroor Dakhili, who was a very active member of the Baha’i Community, was arrested and executed. Shohreh’s family was forced into hiding for 18 months for the protection of her father who was a member of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Iran. During this 18-month period she and her family stayed with different friends, relatives and members of the Baha’I community.  However, Shohreh’s father, Dr. Syroos Roshani, was arrested by Muslim extremists, along with other members of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Iran, and executed in December 1981. A documentary called “Iranian Revolutionary Justice” produced by the BBC, which can be found on YouTube, shows the history of this period. In this documentary footage of Shohreh’s father is shown defending the Baha’i Community of Iran to Muslim clergy right before execution. Shohreh and her mother are interviewed in the documentary as well.

Since Iran’s Islamic government does not allow Baha’is to attend university, Shohreh was deprived of the right of education. However, equal rights for men and women are one of the principles of the Baha’i Faith, therefore, Shohreh had the support of her family to choose to study anything that she wanted. Shohreh then came to Canada in 1994 as a potential bone marrow doner to her sister, Shiva Roshani, who had leukemia. Shiva was 14 years older than Shohreh and had left Iran to continue her education in 1976, three years before the Revolution in Iran.

Shohreh’s extraordinary life has inspired her passion for both justice and the environment. She also excels in both math and applied sciences, so when she had the opportunity to study Civil Engineering at the University of Alberta, she chose to focus on environmental engineering which had additional environmental courses to the traditional Civil Engineering program. Shohreh is now a very proud professional engineer who has been running her own environmental consulting business for the last 7 years called Ursa Environment Inc. Ursa Environment Inc., has helped many small businesses to resolve their environmental complications and succeed in their business.

Links mentioned in this episode:

Iranian Revolutionary Justice Documentary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdsFrwJb8NM

Ursa Environment Inc. - https://ursaenvironment.com/

DID YOU KNOW?

Ursa Major is a constellation in the northern sky, whose associated mythology likely dates back into prehistory. Its Latin name means "greater she-bear," referring to and contrasting it with nearby Ursa Minor, the lesser bear.

Welcome back for the  first episode of our fall series! Our guest this month is the inspirational Vice President of Entrepreneurship and Innovation with Economic Development Lethbridge (EDL), Renae Barlow. Renae joined EDL in January 2010. As a past member of the EDL Board of Directors and the Executive Committee, Renae brings over 30 years of senior management expertise in small business and non-profit management to her role. She has experience launching national new initiatives, project management, strategic planning, organizational development, and motivational team management. Renae is a proven leader in creating business and community partnerships, business development, program development and project management. Renae was awarded the 2018 YWCA Woman of Distinction for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and nominated by peers for the 2020 Canada's Most Powerful Women Top 100 Award.

Links mentioned in this episode:

WESTEM: https://westem.ca/

Economic Development Lethbridge: https://chooselethbridge.ca/

Regional Innovation Network of Southern Alberta (RINSA): https://rinsa.ca/

Ladies Learning Code: https://www.canadalearningcode.ca/