The RADIUS Slingshot 2020 Accelerator Welcomes its Newest Program Participants!

After a rigorous application process, RADIUS is excited to announce that Community Garden App, Crowsnest Wildcraft, Eat the Dishes, Long Table Grocery, Seven Movements, and The Thingery are the six social ventures that will be participating in the 2020 Health Promotion Lab Slingshot Accelerator

The RADIUS Health Promotion Lab aims to help prevent the widespread issue of lifestyle-based chronic diseases through the creation and incubation of innovative new models, ventures, partnerships and health system interventions. Within this lab, there are three unique lab programs designed to support entrepreneurs and ventures at key stages of development; ideation, validation, and growth. The Slingshot Accelerator program, designed to support the growth stage, is a six-month program that supports early stage, social impact ventures that are ready to grow.

Through Slingshot’s unique combination of cohort-based learning, individualized mentorship and equity investment, ventures are supported to deepen their impact and become investment and market ready while connecting to a community of like-minded, passionate entrepreneurs. RADIUS also offers up to a $25K equity investment and $15K of in-kind support for every venture in this program.

With 44% of adults in Canada dealing with chronic disease, it can be a daunting task to think of ways to prevent such outcomes. But these social entrepreneurs have found their own unique ways of promoting and encouraging healthier lifestyles. RADIUS welcomes back Seven Movements, Eat the Dishes and The Thingery as Alumni from the Health Promotion Trampoline Program. Seven Movements is leveling up their online platform that encourages users to bring more frequent movement to their day 7-minutes at a time. Tackling food waste and sustainability, Eat the Dishes promotes healthy initiatives and education through plant-based foods. Through its lending model, The Thingery provides communities with access to workshops and all kinds of equipment to enable people to get outdoors while addressing social isolation and disaster preparedness. Crowsnest Wildcraft aims to connect people to nature by providing wilderness and ancestral skills educational programs. Community Garden App aims to reduce food insecurity and activate public spaces. Serving the North Cariboo community, Long Table Grocery is strengthening community and food security by improving access to locally grown foods and healthful workshops.

Read on for more details about each social venture.

Eat the Dishes is a zero-waste, plant-based street food company that offers artisanal soups, hot chocolate, and gelato in a freshly baked edible bread cup, along with an upcycled fabric napkin with each purchase, to encourage reuse rather than single use items. 

Our great customer experience comes from our unique, high quality product, along with our curated toppings bar, including fresh herbs, nuts, seeds, and spices, along with other local vegan products. 

Eat the Dishes showcases that zero waste vegan food is delicious, convenient, healthy, and have a positive impact on the environment and animal welfare. We use locally sourced ingredients to minimize our carbon footprint, and strongly advocate for B grade, or “bumped and bruised” produce, in order to tackle food waste. 

Eat the Dishes will always be 100% vegan, because we believe that a vegan diet is one of the single biggest steps towards a sustainable future.

Long Table Grocery is a social enterprise dedicated to increasing strength, resilience and capacity in our local food system. We directly purchase from over 40 local farms, ranches and food processors. We operate a local/organic produce subscription box program serving nearly 200 customers in addition to a food market, catering service and cafe that offers local/organic food. Our cafe offers a daily pay-what-you-want soup made from surplus market produce. Our Pay-it-Forward Box program supplies two local charities with weekly donations of fresh produce and grocery vouchers. We provide workshops in food preservation, cooking, art and DIY skills. We act as advocates and promoters of local food and agriculture and are committed to a sustainable future for our local food system.

The Community Garden App is an online platform for community garden members and managers to engage and administer the operations of community gardens and shared growing spaces.

Managing community gardens is an administrative burden on volunteer garden managers, taking away time from growing and connecting with neighbours. The Community Garden App includes all the tools a garden manager needs: sign-up new gardeners, build e-mail lists, collect fees online, see who’s paid, and make sure everyone stays up to date. The app is free for all community gardeners.

Community gardens are healthy, shared spaces which offer simple solutions to complex problems facing our local neighbourhoods. Supporting community gardens can help to revitalize neighborhoods affected by urban decline, build a sense of community, grow healthy food, teach environmental education, and create a sense of place.

Crowsnest Wildcraft is a wilderness skills education project, offering workshops and programming at the intersection of personal and cultural healing. Specializing in hide tanning, herbal medicine, and backwoods immersions, Crowsnest connects ancestral skills to modern life. Within this framework, it offers learning moments of embodied presence and deep time. Crowsnest is guided by a mandate for Reconciliation between First Nations and settlers, and by a commitment to community building and personal growth for its participants, creating the grounds for personal transformation and social change.

Seven Movements allows people to bring more movement into their day through 7-minute movement breaks focused on pain and injury prevention, increasing energy, and making the body feel good.

We help people bring movement to otherwise sedentary environments by creating spaces and content that make grabbing a 7-minute movement break as practical and convenient as grabbing a coffee.

We partner with the best coaches and companies in the world to deliver a world-class exercise program that teaches us how to take the best care of our bodies by giving us the tools we need to move, think, & feel better throughout our day.

Our goal at Seven Movements is to be a part of your long term healthy journey that will allow you to keep doing the activities you love for life.

Due to financial and spatial constraints, a growing number of people living in Canada’s urban populations, do not have access to the right equipment needed to participate in indoor and outdoor activities. The Thingery provides communities with convenient and affordable access to the equipment they need to pursue their passions by operating self-service equipment lending libraries. We currently operate three sites in the Metro Vancouver region that provide local community members with access to recreation equipment, woodworking tools, event & entertainment equipment and household appliances.

We are grateful to the following sponsors and partners for their in-kind financial support in making this cohort possible.

If you have any questions or comments related to the Slingshot Accelerator program, reach out to Vanja (VJ) Terzic at vterzic@radiussfu.com.