Last summer I spent a week mentoring at the Unreasonable Institute in Boulder, CO where I met (amongst many other amazing people) the folks from MANA Nutrition (a non-profit with a mission to bring an end to severe acute malnutrition in Africa). Over the last couple of months they have developed a concept which is radical and radically cool — and now they need your help. So instead of giving you my daily portion of no-BS entrepreneurship advice, I want to see if we, the Heretic tribe, can help them:
/// A letter from MANA’s founders Mark Moore and Troy Hickerson
What an honor to address our fellow Heretics!
Our mission at MANA is to end childhood deaths to due to malnutrition. To help make this happen we built a factory in Georgia where we manufacture a special fortified peanut butter and sell it to UNICEF, USAID and other organizations who then distribute it to severely malnourished kids, typically in Africa. It comes in 500 calorie packets which cost 33 cents and is called RUTF (Ready to Use Therapeutic Food).
Now that the factory is up and running we have been working on a new project called the Calorie Cloud. The idea here is to collect the abundant calories we burn or lose here in US and turn them into life saving food for undernourished kids. Think gyms, marathons, schools and corporate wellness programs.
We want to recycle trillions of calories and need a technology platform to help make it happen. We have some interest from large corporations which could pay to monetize the calories their employees burn and the halo effect of savings lives of malnourished kids while also lowering healthcare costs. Facilitating this type of company/group experience would be one of the goals of the platform.
Where we need help:
- Platform Architect Role — Longer term chief architect of the platform; helping to coordinate volunteers, code review, white label design, web and mobile, coding
- Branding — Strategy that works for both direct to consumers and also works to launch into a company wellness program as “powered by the Calorie Cloud”
- UX design — Making this this super simple and connect to the message of how the calories they burn getting healthy directly convert to live saving calories. Creative teams and groups formation both assigned teams and self-forming teams. Group and individual challenges.
- Coding — anyone willing to take large or small tasks such as adding a new app or device to the platform via an API, coding a new challenge or mobile app.
Interested? Send Mark an email at [email protected]