Active for Good with Calorie Cloud
SU HQ competed against 10 SingularityU Chapters globally to feed kids in developing nations
It goes without saying that our team at Singularity University is always intensely interested in our SU Labs portfolio companies, but we often don’t get to have a true hands-on experience with them. Most of us aren’t in need of 3D printing in space (just yet) and are more likely to see human therapists rather than getting AI-powered mental healthcare. So we were all pretty excited to interact with the consumer-facing startup Calorie Cloud, which literally takes calories burned by individuals and translates them into real-world, nutritious calories for kids in developing nations.
Last month our Human Resources leaders and incredible Community team organized a global, 30-day Calorie Cloud challenge between Singularity University HQ in Mountain View and seven other SingularityU Chapters around the world.
Our joint efforts led to the donation of 3,071 life-saving packets of Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF) packets to children who need them.
Just one RUTF packet contains 500 calories of nutrient-rich food, and children suffering from severe acute malnourishment need three packets per day over a period of six to eight weeks to greatly improve their health. Even my meager efforts at physical fitness—burning only 417 calories per day on average—resulted in 20 RUTF packets.
Though SU HQ burned the most calories of any entrant (we also had 58 people participating), the SingularityU Rome Chapter led us all in average calories burned. Other participating chapters included, by ranking of average daily calories burned per participant:
- SingularityU Dubai, UAE
- SingularityU Recife, Brazil
- SingularityU Laredo, Texas
- SingularityU Milan, Italy
- SingularityU San Diego, California
- SingularityU Belo Horizonte, Brazil
Pro tip: Find your own local Chapter here!
I caught up with SingularityU Rome Chapter Ambassador Luca La Mesa over the phone to hear a little bit about his experience with the Calorie Cloud challenge.
“I want to activate my local community,” Luca said. “I want to use social media to share the message that everyone can help in such an easy way; by running, swimming, we can really help others.”
“I want to use social media to share the message that everyone can help in such an easy way.”
–SingularityU Rome Chapter Ambassador Luca La Mesa
The challenge also offered some pretty awesome opportunities for Chapters around the world to provide direct feedback about their experience with Calorie Cloud’s Workplace Activity Challenge , both as participants sponsoring the challenge, and also as Calorie Cloud app users and members of the same SingularityU Community.
It’s always exciting to see members of our community working together to make local impact. In this case, we made an extremely positive, transparent difference in the global grand challenges of food and health, and I’m here to tell you that that makes a world of difference when you jump on the elliptical or start a day hike.
🏃 Learn more about Calorie Cloud at CalorieCloud.com.
📲 Connect with Luca, Matthew, and hundreds of others in the SingularityU community with the SingularityU Hub app for iOS.
