Propeller Welcomes 24 Social Innovators to New Orleans Startup Accelerator

New Orleans-based Propeller exists to support local entrepreneurs tackling the city’s social and environmental inequities. Each year the non-profit welcomes social innovators with big ideas to increase access to healthy food, equitable education, health services, and water management.

Twenty four early-stage businesses and non-profits have been selected to participate in Propeller’s three-month fall Startup Accelerator.

Meet the ventures tackling issues in food, education, health, and water:

Food Ventures

• 2nd Chance Donuts makes great donuts and giving second chances at life to formerly incarcerated individuals.
• Clean Course Meals provides wholesome, nutritious, delicious prepared meals.
• Greek Girls Rice Pudding produces a ready-to-enjoy, authentically Greek treat that merges an ancient family recipe with Louisiana-sourced ingredients.
• Instar Farm is an all-female team building and maintaining organic, sustainable Edible Gardens to teach New Orleanians how to grow food in their own backyards.
• Lower 9th Ward Co-op Kitchen serves healthy, locally-sourced, delicious food to groups and individuals around the city through a cooperative business that benefits, is governed by, and is accountable to the community where it lives: The Lower 9th Ward.
• Schmelly’s Dirt Farm employs graduates of local high school farm programs to connect businesses and local residents to urban farms by way of their compostable trash.

Water Ventures

• The Great Delta Tours creates ecotourism experiences that educate and inspire people to celebrate, protect, and advocate for a sustainable, resilient southeast Louisiana.
• Magnolia Landscape Architecture is a landscape architecture office designing streetscapes and storm water management systems for New Orleans communities
• Marine Gardens is a New Orleans-based environmental technology company utilizing recycled and repurposed hazardous mineral waste and well-developed geopolymer science to create custom coastal erosion infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico.
• Orleans Resource Center develops, builds and markets patented products, including a drag net designed to contain and collect water-borne oiled debris, tar balls, and thin oil sheens.
• TBD tackles coastal land loss in Louisiana through science-based environmental services including surveying, wetland delineation, permitting, planting, monitoring, and analysis.

Health Ventures

• Huntington Health Innovations helps people navigate the health insurance market by creating digital products that smartly integrate with existing consumer support.
• JustBeFly Fitness is a mobile fitness unit designed to help individuals, communities, and businesses build a more personal, accessible relationship with fitness, wellness, and health.
• Mymee is an app tackling the common problem underlying all chronic autoimmune disease (immune dysregulation) through data analytics and health coaching.
• Sista Midwife Productions eliminates perinatal disparities by increasing the numbers of black birth workers, teaching families about their patient rights and creating transparency and accountability within childbirth education and the medical obstetrical system.
• SPLC Health & Wellness provides screenings and practical information on warning signs, and healthcare to marginalized individuals and their caregivers.
• What’s Your Revolution helps a diverse cohort of men find the healthiest version of themselves through peer learning, community events, and local media outlets.
• Yoga 504 Youth provides culturally accessible and trauma responsive yoga classes to teens in Greater New Orleans area impacted by the school-to-prison pipeline.

Education Ventures

• Crescent City Corps builds a talent pipeline that creates the next generation of law enforcement leaders.
• Erosync is a student transportation consulting agency providing comprehensive reviews and recommendations to improve service and profitability of the transportation programs offered by school networks, individual schools, and third party school bus companies.
• FollowMyCal is a social calendar that centralizes personal, professional, and social events into one platform to improve engagement between parents and schools, increase parent involvement, and student productivity.
• Goshin-Kai Academy is a school for the art of self-protection that fuses literacy, traditional martial arts training, meditation, and contemporary martial arts therapy, as well as firearms training, responsibility, and adherence to local, state and federal laws.
• The Juror Project teaches the community how to reform the criminal justice system through the jury box by increasing the diversity of jury panels.
• Science Teachers’ Equipment Lending Library provides a resource share facility for science equipment and teacher planning resources to and improve New Orleans STEM outcomes.