Inclined to help
Cape Breton social entrepreneur starts ramp business to break down barriers
A young Cape Breton entrepreneur has turned an embarrassing summer camp experience into a company that will reduce barriers for people with mobility problems, prevent old tires from ending up in landfills, and create jobs in First Nations communities.
Several years ago, Rebecca Dunphy was volunteering at a camp near Orangedale, Inverness County, for people with disabilities. One day during an outing at a local museum, one of the campers struggled to get her wheelchair across a gravel parking lot to the rickety wooden ramp that led inside. “Getting her inside took five times as long as it should have — this is something that people just don’t think about. I was just lugging her and pulling her with all my might to get her to the ramp, and once we got inside, she was embarrassed, and no one should feel embarrassed just to go to a leisurely activity,” said Dunphy.
“Nobody should feel embarrassed to get into a building, and she was ashamed of herself, which is ridiculous.”
The incident became the catalyst for Dunphy’s company, Ramp-Age.
Dunphy will be showcasing
her business idea at the second annual Youth Innovation Summit in Ottawa on Monday. She will be joined by a second Cape Bretoner, Anne O’Neill of Sydney.
The 23-year-old from Whycocomagh officially launched the social enterprise earlier this year with the plan to eventually manufacture portable accessibility ramps in a local Mi’kmaq community using the rubber from old car tires.
According to Dunphy, whose day job as social enterprise development manager at Common Good Solutions is spent working with entrepreneurs who want to start businesses that meet a community, environmental, economic or social need, Ramp-Age ticks off several of those boxes.
She said roughly 3.8-million Canadians have mobility issues, only 20 per cent of the rubber is actually used on the average tire (four billion of which are in landfills worldwide), and the unemployment rate in Canadian First Nations communities is 15.5 per cent, more than twice the national average of 5.8 per cent.
Dunphy intends to initially market the ramps, which cover two to three steps, to small businesses that want to be accessible but can’t afford to put in a costly permanent structure.
While the project has parttime passion, Dunphy has already gained the attention of one of the world’s biggest tire manufacturers.
Michelin, which operates three production plants in Nova Scotia, is helping her through the research and development phase.
The company’s civil and mechanical engineers are guiding her with the design process and will help build the prototype. Michelin has also agreed to supply the recycled rubber once Ramp-Age hits the manufacturing stage.
“That’s kind of the next step is we’re going to be doing a lot of experimenting. We want the frame to be aluminum, so we need to figure out, is it possible to use recycled aluminum for the frame? Is it too heavy if we use this certain type? What’s the lightest? It’s going to be a lot of give and take, as well as there’s just been so many ideas thrown out through all these conversations.”
One of the things Dunphy and Michelin are working on is finding an eco-friendly item to mix with the rubber for better traction.
When she learned that the company used walnut shells on a project at Yosemite National Park in California, she had a Cape Breton-inspired idea.
“Nova Scotia has a problem with lobster shells — we don’t know what to do with them — so what if we mixed them in there?” she said, noting “there’s going to be a lot of experimenting” until the model is finalized.
In the meantime, Dunphy said Nova Scotia organizations and businesses she’s spoken to want to be barrier-free.
“People are fed up with being inaccessible, but they just don’t know what the solutions are,” she said.
“They’re realizing that they’re missing out on a whole market of people, because it’s not just people in wheelchairs you’re missing out on, it’s mothers with stroller or anybody else.”