Two teams of students from the Schulich School of Business are now reaching out to the York community for support as they compete in the 2013 Hult Prize Global Online Competition.
Each year, the Hult Prize challenges participants to develop solutions to one of the world’s most pressing social issues. Working in partnership with the Clinton Global Initiative, the competition is a start-up accelerator for social entrepreneurship and 
the world’s largest student movement for social good.
Schulich MBA students Riyad Mobeen, Srivatsan Vijayakumar, Ken Fong, Jasmine Dove and Monika Kajal, as well as BBA students Jeremy Vo, Zahra Kassam, Rohan Arora, Peter Lu and Ada Huang comprise the two teams that need York to vote by clicking here and here). The 10 teams with the most votes before May 12 in the public voting round will move on to the closed jury selection round.
The online competition winner will join regional finalists from Boston, San Francisco, London, Dubai and Shanghai at the Hult Prize finals in New York City for the chance to win US$1 million in start-up funding to launch their social ventures.
The theme of the 2013 Hult Prize is global food security and focuses on how to get safe, sufficient, affordable and easily accessible food to the 200 million people who 
live in urban slums – a challenge personally selected by former U.S. president Bill Clinton. Student teams must develop a sustainable social venture that can accomplish the objective by 2018.
The Schulich MBA students developed hubble, a game-changing social enterprise that aims to drive the cost of fruits and vegetables down by simplifying the food system. Their aim is to connect small-scale farmers with street vendors to provide millions of urban slum dwellers around the world access to affordable and nutritious produce.
“Being from a small farmer’s family in a small village in India, and having the first-hand experience of working in one of Asia’s biggest urban slums made me aware of the day-to-day struggle farmers face getting their produce to market and how excessive markups hurt people living in the slums,” said Kajal (MBA candidate ’14). “So we set forth to develop a solution that fills the gaps I witnessed.”
To vote for hubble:
- vote on Facebook (no mobile voting available);
- scroll down to hubble: Feeding Change;
- view the video, then click vote for hubble.
Velocit-E is the social enterprise developed by the Schulich BBA team. Its solution to address world hunger in urban slums is to create a management energy system that includes tornadoes, biogas and waste.
To vote for Velocit-E:
- vote on Facebook (no mobile voting available);
- scroll down to Velocit-E Project;
- view the video, then click vote for Velocit-E.
More than 10,000 participants, representing more than 150 different countries and more than 350 colleges and universities, are competing in the 2013 Hult Prize competition.
For more information on hubble, visit Facebook and Twitter. For more information on Velocit-E, visit Facebook.
For more information on the competition, visit the Hult Prize website.