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Learn how to be a creative, inspired, and empowered business leader in your community.
Mercy Southam is a Doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine and the Founder and Owner of Eir Mobile Medicine, Canada’s first mobile acupuncture and natural medicine studio. Her entrepreneurial journey started at the age of 10, when she founded her community’s first Dog Walking-Private Detective Agency. Seeing the potential of combining these two lucrative industries, Mercy successfully spent the summer of 1996 with her eyes, ears, and (dogs’) nose on the neighbourhood. Since then, Mercy has explored a variety of industries and professions. She competed throughout Europe and North America as a Rhythmic Gymnast, lived alongside indigenous communities in the Kalahari Desert as a Medical Anthropologist, was a Professional Pillow Fighter with Toronto’s former Pillow Fight League, and has worked throughout North America and Uganda as an international non-profit Programs Coordinator. It was through these varied professions that Mercy discovered the single thread that links us all together: When our communities feel their best, everybody wins. With this ethos in mind, Mercy has devoted the decade to studying Acupuncture + Traditional Chinese Medicine. Having studied in both the USA and Canada, Mercy has immersed herself in a variety of healthcare systems, identifying ways to improve on existing structures. Her studies led her to residencies at Rady’s Children’s Hospital (San Diego, CA) and the MHS Family Recovery Centre (Oceanside, CA), where she witnessed first hand the power of collaboration between Eastern and Western medicine, and the importance of providing Acupuncture + Natural Medicine to the community.
Business is nutritious for supporting your community! This course will help demystify what it means to be an entrepreneur and provide the skills and information necessary to create a values-based business in the field of nutrition.
In this course, you will learn about business planning and development, marketing strategies, systems for business set-up, record keeping/financials, and much more. You will come to understand that businesses are dynamic and holistic endeavours.
You will learn about potential employment opportunities in the field of nutrition and how to design and implement their own business projects.
In addition, you will gain insight into how to sustainably create a business using the information you acquire through this course. You will also learn about the importance of using business as a force for good in your communities and will be able to implement social entrepreneurship principles to their chosen projects.
Creativity, resourcefulness, and critical thinking are vital to succeeding in the business arena where change is constant, and decisions are based on variable factors.
This course is meant for students with little to no background in business, and the hope is that creating/running a business or being self-employed will seem less intimidating after completing this course.
Upon completion of this course, you will have the ability to:
Section I | Welcome
1. Introduction
2. Course outline
Section II | The business of nutrition
3. Getting into your business headspace
4. Business possibilities
5. Discover your passion & vision
6. Building a business model
7. Legal structures of business & registration
8. Marketing: getting the word out
9. Financials of your business
10. Business as a force for good
Section III | Conclusion
11. Course review & next steps