ACCELERATE YOUR PLANS
by Angela Shelf Medearis, President, Diva-Licious Brands
On June 19th (which is also called Juneteenth or the African-American 4th of July in Texas) my husband, Michael and I started the five-month-long Social Innovation Accelerator at Impact Hub Austin. It was a personally and financially liberating experience for us, and the accelerate that we needed to start our new business, Diva-Licious Brands.
Our Company is a first-to-market, diabetes-friendly, vegetarian and plant protein-based food products company with a social venture mission to provide healthy food access and green job employment opportunities in under-served communities.
We were selected from numerous other applicants and received a grant which gave us the priceless gift of time to focus on shaping our business concept and the details of our social venture for the first time. The grant allowed us to be laser-focused on Diva-Licious Brands without the need to secure catering jobs to supplement our income.
When we started the Accelerator program, we had completed the legalities to form the company, targeted the focus of our brand and our refined social mission to use food as medicine and create a product line that has little impact on a diabetics blood glucose level, formulated the recipes for our products, and devised a basic business plan.
From that starting point, the Accelerator helped us to refine our business pitch by providing us with the tools to think in a way that helped hone our idea into a clear and definitive description of the company and concisely defined business plan. Impact Hub Austin’s program changed the velocity of the time it would typically take to get our new business in position for investments.
Our work in the Accelerator helped us to refine our plan and focus on securing seed funding for the formulation, testing, and certification of our Diva-Licious Brands products as Phase One of our business plan. Securing the first $500,000 needed for product formulation, production and marketing is more appealing to investors because of the large number of potential sales in both the diabetic and vegetarian markets.
Product sales would also enable us to self-fund the production costs, and secure advertising sponsors for Phase II of our business plan, producing THE KITCHEN DIVA! television show on PBS, with syndication and ad sales to Cable, Streaming and on-line outlets.
I’ll be the first African-American woman, Chef, creator, writer, Executive Producer and host of THE KITCHEN DIVA! show, a new healthy cooking/lifestyle program on PBS broadcast networks! This worldwide media exposure will allow me the opportunity to share my nutritious, vegetarian-based cooking methods and recipes that transform American comfort foods and soulful ethnic cuisines into “Diva-Licious” dishes suitable for diabetics and anyone who loves to great food!
Because we retain the rights to all of our content, we will also create an ad-supported healthy cooking and lifestyle website and a diabetes database that will contain more culturally-based health information and recipes. This website will also allow me to interact with millions of viewers and site visitors world-wide.
Our original grant proposal focused on the City of Austin Strategic Direction 2023 Indicator and Challenge area regarding creating healthy food access and economic opportunity in the form of expanding our Booker T. Washington HACA Culinary Training and Self-Sufficiency program for single mothers with school-aged children.
We’ve incorporated our current Culinary Training program into Phase III of our revised business plan which focuses on launching our Diva-Licious! Restau-Markets in Fall, 2021. Our Diva-Licious! Restau-Markets will provide job training opportunities and employment for residents in underserved neighborhoods, particularly in the East Austin Crescent.
Since graduating from the program, we’ve pitched to a few investors and formed invaluable partnerships with mentors who have assisted us with advice on every aspect of the venture process. We anticipate that we will be on track to implement Phase I and II of our business plan in 2020!
We also started working on an expansion of our original culinary training program which provided additional income for low-income residents as part of the new Displacement Mitigation Accelerator. We received a seed grant to implement our plan to mediate the conflicts between landlords and tenants, create an easier way to apply for rental assistance from City, County, and non-profit organizations, and stop the numerous evictions in East Austin’s Pct. 1 at the beginning of the eviction process rather than waiting until the case becomes part of the over-burdened Pct. 1 court docket.
Our Displacement Mitigation plan also addresses the problem of lack of income to pay for the increasing cost of living in Austin via our Side Hustle University program to provide training to create home-based businesses for Pct. 1 area residents.
Thanks to the invaluable training that we received as part of the Social Innovation Accelerator, we were able to research and form a plan to address this growing displacement problem, create a pitch deck, and successfully explain our plan to a panel of funders in a matter of weeks! Our successful pitch won us seed funding to create the foundation of our Displacement Mitigation plan and the time to secure grants for additional funding.
The Social Innovation Office team, the grant funds that we received, Impact Hub and Blue Sky Partners, the support from the businesses that provided funding and support for the Accelerator have all had a lasting impact on our personal and professional way of thinking about ways to implement our passion to help others, to make lasting social change, and to create a legacy of health in underserved communities in Austin and around the world. We are forever grateful for the opportunity and we plan to pay it forward for the rest of our lives. Thank you!
