Five social good innovations
These include a translation app that helps connect refugees with the services they need to a plant-based burger tackling the meat industry.
1. Tarjimly connects refugees with translators
One of the biggest barriers to helping the globally displaced is language. Tarjimly is a Facebook Messenger bot that connects volunteer translators with refugees and immigrants in dire need of translation services. Whether they seek to speak with legal representatives, doctors, or aid workers, Tarjimly is making it easier for refugees to seek and connect with the services they so desperately need.
2. Impossible Foods plant burgers take on the meat industry
Impossible Foods is partnering with Bareburgers to convince the meat-loving masses that they can ditch carbon-intensive meat without giving up their favourite comfort foods. With investors including Khosla Ventures, Google Ventures and Bill Gates, Impossible Foods raised $108m in 2015 to build a new factory in Oakland, California, which the company plans to open later this month. The burgers, which apparently taste just like the real thing, are made of potato and wheat proteins, coconut oil, Japanese yam and a soy-based protein.
3. Buy one give one office space
A new project brings the buy one give one concept to property. Buy Give Work allows businesses to subsidise and share their office space. For every space purchased, one will be given away to a non-profit serving the local area, an early stage start-up, or for an experimental community-led idea. The advantages for non-profits are clear. But the idea also offers clear benefits to businesses that, along with a greater sense of purpose, can gain insight from the diversity the relationship brings.
4. Jornaler@ protects day labourers
Day labourers are among the most vulnerable members of the workforce. They can experience labour violations on a daily basis. Jornaler@ is a mobile phone app created to help prevent and report occurrences of wage theft through personal data collection and labour rights education. The app allows workers to keep track of their hours, report an event of wage theft – including necessary documentation to begin complaint and proceedings – and alert other workers of bad employers or non-paying jobs.
5. Poppits: the end of the toothpaste tube?
Empty toothpaste tubes collect at a rate of 1.3 billion per year and can sit in landfill for up to 500 years. Poppits are individual pods of toothpaste that dissolve in your mouth as you brush your teeth. There is no waste, no mess, and no plastic tubes that need to be thrown out.
