Building better communities: QBE, Ashoka Urban Resilience Challenge winners crowned
Urban Resilience Challenge finalists faced-off in NYC yesterday to compete for the top prize of $75,000.
In the final round of QBE North America and Ashoka’s Urban Resilience Challenge on Wednesday, 10 chosen companies from all over the world presented their work to a panel of judges to compete for the first and second-place prizes of $75,000 and $25,000, respectively.
In what QBE and Ashoka describe as a “national social innovation competition,” the mission of the Challenge was to uncover and help fund tech-based innovations that will foster resiliency in major cities and urban communities. Each company was chosen based on how positively their mission impacts policy and the broader urban ecosystem and its effectiveness in creating an environment more resilient against physical, economic, and social risks.
The 10 finalists were broken down into 4 categories based on the social, economic or environmental concern their work aims to address :
- The Built Environment (Infrastructure): Innovations that improve a city’s ability to manage its physical assets through a natural disaster, environmental degradation, as well as the overall capacity needs of urban spaces.
- Finalist: Omega Grid
- Sustainable Economies: Innovations that expand the economic ecosystem and diversity within an urban area, such as the use of technology to create new industries.
- Finalists: Cityflag, Citysense and SensCity
- Food, Water, & Waste: Innovations that improve access to sustainable and healthy food, clean water and reduce waste.
- Finalists: Arqlite, Biocollection, Dox and Exergy
- Public Health & Safety: Innovations that improve welfare and protection of the public, environmental health and behavior, city livability, and access to justice, rule of law, and law enforcement.
- Finalists: Drugviu and ODN
And the winners are…
After two hours of presentations and deliberation, judges crowned Drugviu, an innovative online medication forum for communities of color, as the first-place winner of the 2019 Urban Resilience Challenge, taking home the top prize of $75,000.
The second-place title and $25,000 prize went to Biocollection, a Silicon Valley-based company providing an innovative, market-based solution to recycle “unrecyclable” plastic. Co-founders Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao started Biocollection to provide a solution for the plastic that doesn’t get recycled, which Wang says is astonishing 91% of all plastic in the world.
Drugviu spotlights race gap in clinical trials, pharmaceuticals
Founded by Melanie Igwe, Drugviu was spawned to address a major health crisis among minority groups who have historically been left out of clinical trials and considerations for pharmaceuticals, and as a result, are uniquely exposed to adverse effects of medications.
Melanie Igwe said she felt the impact of this injustice when her father experienced adverse reactions to his post-stroke medications due, in part, to this lack of medical data, and knew his story wasn’t unique.
As an online community forum, Drugviu collects authenticated, user-generated health profiles from people of color that include their medication experiences. Drugviu combines these online reviews with pharmacist expertise and FDA data in an effort to provide patients with better information and physicians and pharma companies with more data.
“We are planning on building the largest medication outcomes for minority groups on the planet,” Drugviu co-founder Kwaku Owusu said, ”and this check is going to help us build that as we move into the genomic space.”
Owusu said competing in this challenge taught the Drugviu team some valuable lessons about their work. thought a lot about how we could make our product better or make sure the solution that we have is actually changing the system.
“I want to live in a world where my mom, my aunt, my little brother, and my future kids aren’t hurt by the medications they need,” Drugviu co-founder Kwaku Owusu said. “That’s why we created Drugviu.”
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