The Experience of Launching a Social Venture in 6 Months
- Ginny P.
- Feb 4, 2019
- 2 min read
Most people take their time when going through the process of launching a venture. It is extremely time consuming, and there always seems to be some sort of roadblock that presents itself. When I received an email in August before school started explaining that I had to successfully create and launch a social venture by February (or we would not pass the class), I was extremely nervous.
Fast forward to September, I decided to partner with my good friend Laura. We had worked together before, and knew we would make a good team. After going through a countless number of ideas, we decided on one. Our goal was to eliminate the food wasted in places like Tim Hortons for example, by collecting their food and either handing it out to homeless people, or to students on campus. We learned that Tim Hortons specifically throws out all the food that was not sold by the end of each day, to keep up with their “Always Fresh” promise.
A month and a half later, we were stuck. We changed our idea again and decided we were going to connect seniors with people with intellectual disabilities. We were absolutely set on this idea, and could not wait to build it. We were quickly disheartened when we emailed a variety of places and got no responses.
Finally, in about November, we realized the new idea we had generated was similar to one of our classmates. This was when we decided to partner with our third member, Roxy. Roxy was pursuing a venture with the goal of creating healthy habits for students. Many students do not know how to cook, and often turn to simple meals that provide no nutritional benefits, like Craft Dinner for example. Laura and I still wanted to work with seniors by better integrating them into the community.
This is when GENconnect came about. Our venture is about creating intergenerational connections between students and seniors, while teaching students how to cook. The seniors will share their knowledge and expertise by teaching student’s healthy ways through cooking classes. This better integrates these seniors into society, and allows intergenerational connections to be made.
One of the biggest things I have learned throughout this process is that everything that seems like a failure is instead a learning experience. Laura and I were initially so upset that our ideas were not working, but now we could not be happier with this idea.
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