EPOCH aids refugees in K-W region

/

Students and Alumni at the University of Waterloo have started a new social enterprise project called EPOCH and their goal is to provide relief and assistance to refugees in the Kitchener- Waterloo Region.

The project was founded by Jade Choy, an accounting and finance alumni, Keith Choy, masters of accounting alumni and CPA candidate, and Lisa Tran, science and business undergraduate.

โ€œEPOCH, it means new beginnings,โ€ Tran said.

โ€œIt started as a competition, but it has evolved into a social enterprise. As we did more research, we realized that this is a prominent issue within the K-W region with the Syrian refugee crisis,

โ€œSince thereโ€™s a lot of attention on it right now, thereโ€™s a lot of things we can learn and incorporate it within our own research,โ€ Tran said.

Right now, EPOCH is still in their startup stage, working with the University of Waterlooโ€™s Velocity entrepreneurship program to further develop their project.

โ€œWhat weโ€™ve done is reach out to local organizations to see how they can work with us, in a sense,โ€ she said.

โ€œWe started to get in touch with a local organization, Shamrose for Syrian Culture, that helps Syrian refugees integrate into the K-W region. What we learned was that a lot of Syrian refugees that come to K-W all depend on each other, although they donโ€™t know each other,โ€ Tran said.

โ€œTheir form of communication is through a WhatsApp group, filled with hundreds of people which Shamrose organized,

โ€œWe thought that this is such a great target group. Together with Shamrose, my team and I have been going to their Tuesday evening coffee shops, where Syrian refugees meet and speak with one another, and local communities get to come out as well.โ€

EPOCH hopes to further the work of Shamrose and create a phone app that is specifically designed to help Syrian refugees rebuild their lives in Canada.

โ€œThe goal is to connect refugees with their community members and by connecting them weโ€™re fostering an exchange of services for time credit,โ€ Tran said, regarding how the application would potentially work.

โ€œFor example, how it works is you open the application, as a refugee and you need help learning English. If thereโ€™s someone on the application who is a local community member, that can teach you English [and] you get paired up. You exchange the service, and the refugee would exchange a time credit for an hour of the person teaching English,โ€ she said.

โ€œIn a sense, it would create a battering system that would encourage volunteering in the community,โ€ Tran said.

โ€œWhat we really hope to do is to develop a mobile platform and start testing it in the K-W region, then branch out further into Canada.โ€


  1. James Avatar
    James

    Great article. Would be interested in connecting with the EPOCH team. We are hosting this (https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/refugee-hacknight-tickets-32101634854) event on March 2nd. Its a Refugee HackNight here in Waterloo at Google’s new building.

Leave a Reply

Serving the Waterloo campus, The Cord seeks to provide students with relevant, up to date stories. Weโ€™re always interested in having more volunteer writers, photographers and graphic designers.