WEcast - Supporting Women Entrepreneurs in Southern Alberta

As the WESTEM program comes to an end, we are excited to welcome Dr. Christy Lane as our final guest for WEcast. Dr. Christy Lane is a Startup Founder and award-winning exercise scientist with expertise in big data, wearable devices, and digital health. She has won many international awards for her work in lifestyle medicine and the application of technology in health.  Dr. Lane is the Chair of Health and Physical Education at Mount Royal University and a founding member of the Stanford Wearable Health Lab. She is also the Founder of Vivametrica, a health tech company that uses data from wearable devices to predict mortality and disease risks, as well as to engage individuals in wellness. Dr. Lane has a PhD in Rehabilitation Medicine, and has focused her career around the measurement of physical activity, and promoting exercise as medicine for clinical populations. She is particularly interested in the capabilities of wearable technology for promoting lifestyle behaviour change. She has been recognized as Avenue Calgary's Top 40 Under 40, Top 20 Women in Tech 2018, and was awarded the Mount Royal University Research Excellence Award in 2019.

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Dr. Christy Lane – LinkedIn

Spring has sprung at WEcast! To kick off our Spring 2022 series, we invite Keri Drennan, P.Eng, and founder of Impact Leader to chat with us!

Keri is also a business advisor (with the WESTEM program as one example), an entrepreneurial coach and is passionate about engaging and inspiring people to think outside of the box.  She is a professional Engineer with 24 years of progressive leadership experience in business and she will tell you that she owes her success to building relationships and shifting cultures and paradigms.

Keri has expertise in integrating cultures through transformative leadership and change management.  Being authentic, a great communicator and tough when required, she has successfully transitioned her teams through a variety of mergers and acquisitions.

Keri transitioned from engineering and started Impact Leader in 2018, inspired by her aspiration to live in a world that is inclusive, engaging and inspiring.  Keri believes that everyone deserves to work in a trusting, respectful culture that includes maximizing business goals while having fun

A current focus for Keri is coaching women entrepreneurs in STEM, and her ability to relate and hold people accountable has aided in her success.

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For our 3rd episode of our 3rd season we are very excited today to welcome Roxanne Doerksen CEO, T.R.A.D Worm Industries LTD.

Roxanne grew up a farm girl and has a strong connection with the land therefore protecting the land by keeping compostable refuse out of landfill was a 'no-brainer' for her.  She and her family had an amazingly horrible opportunity presented to them as a family when her daughter was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. At the time they decided that they could try to figure out a way of doing things better or could drown underneath the weight of her sickness. And that is where TRAD was born. Roxanne’s initial business concept was to produce worm castings, or manure, as a soil amendment to support the medical cannabis industry, but her plan took a turn when local growers and residential households started contacting her about how to set up their own worm farms and has since morphed into a leap of faith that embraces the knowledge that we are meant to be good stewards of our earth.

Pressure, and overcoming challenges, are nothing new to Roxanne. She returned to college as a mature student and launched a start up with no business background, but found the knowledge, skills and confidence she needed to succeed at both business and school.

Other than all of this, Roxanne thinks that worms are pretty awesome!

“Worms are more powerful than the African Elephant and are more important to the economy than the cow” - Charles Darwin

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Welcome to Season 3 of WEcast! We kick off 2022 with Stella Sehn as we discuss social entrepreneurship, facing obstacles head-on and her dedication to the Truth and Reconciliation of Canada’s Calls to Action. Stella is a super-mom of three, and she started the 100 % family owned and operated Bee Farm, “Sweet Pure Honey Bee Farm” from scratch with her husband and partner, Sheldon in 2016.   Together they make Canadian hand crafted, handmade, organic, No. 1 Raw White Honey, Beeswax Candles and lip balms using the abundance of healthy crops and wildflowers which surround their prairie farm.  It is important to Stella to have her children see that it's possible to run a business with values – such as respect for employees and the environment – that provides customers with special products and sustains their family.

Stella and Sweet Pure Honey were the Winners of the 2016 Chamber of Commerce Business Ethics Award presented by the Better Business Bureau.  Stella is also an international exporter, distributes honey nationally, is an innovator and social entrepreneur. You can also learn more about Stella and Sweet Pure Honey on Food Power Tv, where they were recently featured.

For our last episode before the Christmas break, we invite student entrepreneurs Lisa Marie Swanepoel and Julia St. Amand to talk about how they’re starting their own businesses while enrolled as full-time students.

Lisa-Marie was born in South Africa and moved to Canada at the age of 10. Her life-long passion for health and well-being has led her to pursue education in public health. She graduated with a Bachelor’s in Public Health from the University of Lethbridge in 2016 and is currently in the final stages of completing her Master of Science in Health Sciences. Lisa-Marie’s entrepreneurship journey started in 2018 with a team of 4. She took part in Craig Elias’s 150 Start-up event where she received an award for her team’s business idea. She has also been awarded the Alberta Innovates seed award. Lisa-Marie and her team are now in the process of preparing to launch their business called Needly. Needly is an app that aims to reduce inefficiencies with needle collection in communities and to keep cities safe.

Julia is an undergraduate student in the dual degree Kinesiology and Business program at the University of Calgary, with a passion for human physiology and social entrepreneurship. She first got involved in entrepreneurship at a healthcare hackathon called Innovation 4 health while working on software to predict bottlenecks in emergency departments.   She worked as a pharmacy assistant, contract analyst, and in software sourcing before leaving her position to pursue her business, RetinaLogik, full time.

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As we continue with our Fall series, we invite Dr. Mishka Singh to talk about her education, what she’s passionate about and her entrepreneurial journey. Mishka Singh is a South African born family physician who enjoys working with a diverse range of patients within the population she serves.  She graduated in 2010 from the University of KwaZulu Natal, Nelson Mandela School of Medicine in South Africa.  Whilst working in South Africa she worked in trauma, emergency medicine and obstetrics.  She moved to Canada in 2015 and has since completed all of her Canadian licencing exams as well as the exams of the College of Family Physicians Canada.  She currently serves a full panel of patients within the Lethbridge community.  She enjoys community service and just recently returned from a trip abroad volunteering with Kitrinos Healthcare at a refugee camp in Lesvos, Greece. Dr. Singh realises that technology is the way of the future which motivated  her to complete a few short courses on Artificial Intelligence in Health Care through MIT and Harvard. She endeavours to continue to improve her skills in her field to continue to help the community she serves.

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Shohreh Roshani was born to an Azerbaijani family in Iran, and Azerbaijani’s language, music and culture are very different from the majority of people in Iran. For the first 5 years of her life she lived in a small town in the Azerbaijan part of Iran, among very high mountains with harsh winters that last 8 months of the year.

Shohreh then lived in Tehran from the ages of 5 to 23, and when she was 7 years old Muslim extremists came to power in Iran. Since Shohreh and her family were not Muslim and belonged to the Baha’i Faith, this change of government altered her family’s and her community’s lives. Shohreh’s cousin, Ruhi Roshani, was kidnapped and murdered by the extremists at the beginning of the revolution in Iran, and a year later her uncle, Dr. Masroor Dakhili, who was a very active member of the Baha’i Community, was arrested and executed. Shohreh’s family was forced into hiding for 18 months for the protection of her father who was a member of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Iran. During this 18-month period she and her family stayed with different friends, relatives and members of the Baha’I community.  However, Shohreh’s father, Dr. Syroos Roshani, was arrested by Muslim extremists, along with other members of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Iran, and executed in December 1981. A documentary called “Iranian Revolutionary Justice” produced by the BBC, which can be found on YouTube, shows the history of this period. In this documentary footage of Shohreh’s father is shown defending the Baha’i Community of Iran to Muslim clergy right before execution. Shohreh and her mother are interviewed in the documentary as well.

Since Iran’s Islamic government does not allow Baha’is to attend university, Shohreh was deprived of the right of education. However, equal rights for men and women are one of the principles of the Baha’i Faith, therefore, Shohreh had the support of her family to choose to study anything that she wanted. Shohreh then came to Canada in 1994 as a potential bone marrow doner to her sister, Shiva Roshani, who had leukemia. Shiva was 14 years older than Shohreh and had left Iran to continue her education in 1976, three years before the Revolution in Iran.

Shohreh’s extraordinary life has inspired her passion for both justice and the environment. She also excels in both math and applied sciences, so when she had the opportunity to study Civil Engineering at the University of Alberta, she chose to focus on environmental engineering which had additional environmental courses to the traditional Civil Engineering program. Shohreh is now a very proud professional engineer who has been running her own environmental consulting business for the last 7 years called Ursa Environment Inc. Ursa Environment Inc., has helped many small businesses to resolve their environmental complications and succeed in their business.

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For our 4th and final episode of our summer series we invite WESTEM client and entrepreneur from Claresholm, AB, Janna Sitovska.  Janna is a registered acupuncturist in Alberta and doctor of Chinese medicine. She studied at the Alberta College of Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine in Calgary and is registered by the College and Association of Acupuncturists of Alberta. Before coming to Claresholm, Janna worked as a registry nurse in a hospital trauma department in the Ukraine and she ran her own business as a medical esthetician prior to becoming interested in natural healing.  Janna’s focus is to get to the root of her patients’ problems. Her goal is improving quality of life by eliminating symptoms and working with the body to revive and enhance the body’s healing potential. Join us as we wrap up our 4-part summer series by highlighting another successful WESTEM client!

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For our third episode, we want to highlight the 6 members of our core team at WESTEM and give a behind the scenes look at part of what makes our organization so great. From our “Jill of All Trades”, Paloma Navarro, who not only is our Client Intake Coordinator but also a business advisor and an entrepreneur herself, to our hard-working and charming podcast technical producer and event coordinator Alyssa Borix who is an amazing advocate for her community and those within it,  to our talented and creative Marketing Coordinator, Chantelle Ball, who somehow manages to balance the demanding aspects of her job while continuing her education at the University of Lethbridge. Join us as we discuss what brought them to our team and what the future holds for this diverse and accomplished group.  This Episode was recorded on August 16, 2021. Links mentioned in this episode:

In the second episode of our 4-part summer series, we invite Kara Potts to share her journey as a celebrated, and very busy Indigenous business owner, innovator and WESTEM client.  Among various business projects throughout her life, Kara launched Potts Painting Inc, a successful and growing commercial painting business, in 2018.  Most recently, she has been working on a product that could revolutionize the commercial painting industry and is exploring other business opportunities on Piikani, which will support the local economy and provide various employment opportunities. Kara also possesses a master’s degree in Business Administration, is a certified Master Painter and has over 20 years of experience in both business and construction. This episode was recorded on July 22, 2021. Links mentioned in this episode:

For our inaugural episode, we invite Wendy Muise, Head of Strategy for Ground Floor Labs (an incubator for new entrepreneurs) and the Founder of Breast Buds (an online community dedicated to supporting those affected by breast cancer) to discuss her own experience as a women entrepreneur and business advisor in rural Alberta.  Join us as Wendy takes us on her on-going personal and professional journey to success. This episode was recorded on July 14, 2021. 

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