EMMA DEVIN
AGE: 29
Co-founder + chief people and product officer, Brood Care Inc.
LIFE STORY: Emma Devin's house may be full of children, but not their own (yet). Caregiving has always come naturally to the entrepreneur, who regularly looks after children in their community and whose business is built on advocating for alternative family structures.
Devin became a certified doula and caregiver after graduating from Pacific Rim College in 2015. They briefly worked at Bunky Bambino, a local doula agency providing birth and postpartum care, before buying the business in 2019 and rebranding it to Brood Care Inc. with co-founders Gillian Damborg and Lizzy Karp.
Born in Paris to an entrepreneur and a restaurateur, Devin spent their childhood and teenage years travelling all over the world, from living on boats and islands to spending time across the U.K., U.S. and Canada. They worked in the kitchen, scrubbed dishes and served and bussed to help their parents out, so when people asked what Devin wanted to be when they grew up, they knew for sure what they didn't want to be: a restaurateur.
They were always drawn to family structures, what it means to expand and the transitions it encompasses for people. Studying doula care at Pacific Rim as a queer-trans person, it became even more compelling for Devin to explore what an ungendered approach to the profession could look like.
“There was no education, no care, no awareness of the spectrum of gender identities, of family structures,” they say. “So, it's been a huge pillar for Brood to focus on the alternatives for family structures that we can nourish and nurture, because everyone from queer-trans folks to cishet families deserve to have the community they need.”
BOTTOM LINE: Inspired by LGBTQIA2S+ families in their community, Brood Care's co-founders officially launched the brand in 2021. Brood is a tech-enabled learning platform and in-person care service for pregnancy, birth, postpartum care and new parenthood with a focus on millennial/gen-z families. Its educational component offers online courses (developed by Devin) on topics such as miscarriages and feeding your baby. During the pandemic, the Vancouver-based doula agency added virtual birth and postpartum care to their operations, as well as an open phone line for new parents. As of 2021, it had already served 400 families and babies. –R.R.
AGE: 20
Founder + executive director, Youth Helping Youth
LIFE STORY: The Cansbridge Fellowship offers $6,000 and a summer internship in Asia to undergrad students from all over Canada. Only 0.5 percent of applicants get in, representing the brightest young leaders in the country. Anjali Dhaliwal is currently one of them.
Born and raised in Surrey, Dhaliwal claims to have always been obsessed with the brain. For as long as she can remember, she wanted to be a neurosurgeon. But while being a doctor is a great career, one night school class completely upended Dhaliwal's plans: “It made me realize that I want to go into business and not neurosciences,” she says. “I realized how many high school students there are in the world that don't know what they want to do and don't know what's out there for them.”
The entrepreneur launched her first business at 16 years old, four months before founding her nonprofit. It was an organic lip balm with recyclable packaging that made it into salons and garnered a few hundred in sales, but it also made
Dhaliwal realize that the space she wanted to make the most impact in was youth and education. So, she launched the nonprofit Youth Helping Youth in 2019 to help high school students discover what they want to do with their futures.
Dhaliwal was heavily influenced by her parents to make giving back a priority in life. She's been donating food and clothes since she was a child, and has also volunteered for various nonprofit organizations.
Her ambitions brought her to the Cansbridge Fellowship today, and also got her a full ride at SFU to study business with a minor in innovation and entrepreneurship.
BOTTOM LINE: With 200 volunteers on board and $70,000 in government grants, Youth Helping Youth has seven chapters across North America. Each one is responsible for connecting youth with opportunities through social media, in-person events, websites, newsletters and podcasts. Dhaliwal particularly wanted to make sure that privilege didn't stop young people from accessing essential workshops, conferences and programs: “I think the best people to give advice to young people are other young people.”–r.r.
AGES: 27 Co-founder + CEO; co-founder +
COO, Omnicart
LIFE STORY: Growing up in Tehran, Arya Rashtchian played for the Iranian capital's professional basketball team. In high school, hoping to leave his conservative homeland, he told his father he wanted to move to Canada. “He was like, Yeah, all good,” Rashtchian recalls, “but I'm not going to pay for it.” So after completing a software engineering degree from Sharif University of Technology, Rashtchian won a scholarship to do a master of computer science at UBC. Moving to Vancouver in 2018, he reconnected with his childhood friend Nader Samadyan, who earned a BSC in computer science from the same school and went on to work as a software developer for SAP Canada and as an infrastructure engineer with Sony Pictures Imageworks.
Halfway through his master's, Rashtchian realized that he wanted to be an entrepreneur after getting accepted to the Creative Destruction Lab program at UBC Sauder School of Business. So he and Samadyan launched Dineeasy, a mini management platform for restaurants. Although the pair brought about 30 local clients on board, they decided the venture wasn't for them. A series of pivots led to Omnicart, a whitelabel service for entrepreneurs who lack the technology to create their own delivery business.
Unlike its U.s.-based rivals, which focus on food and beverage, Omnicart allows customers to sell just about anything. “With our product, they can establish a delivery business for food and beverage, liquor, consumer goods, cannabis,” explains Rashtchian, whose company uses a subscription model and takes a commission for each order. “Also, we offer them a drastically more customizable and modern technology.”
BOTTOM LINE: Omnicart, which launched its product in May 2021, recently began a formal alliance with the Restaurant Marketing and Delivery Association (RMDA), whose 550-plus members span 700 U.S. cities. The 10-employee company plans to have 200 partners by the end of 2024. “The U.S. market will be the main focus in the next 12 months,” Rashtchian says. “After that, we'll definitely consider expansion to Asia, South America and other areas.” –N.R.