Northern Village wins Meridian Small Business Big Impact Award

Arnie Mikelsons:
Hello, my name's Arnie Mikelsons. I'm the founder of Northern Village and we are the winner of the Meridian Small Business Contest in its first year. The winnings from Meridian helped us finish Access to ID so that we can help agencies who are helping people experiencing homelessness recover their ID.

Social benefits software is the basis of Northern Village now. It allows us to take a specific piece of software for a specific client and generalize it so that many social benefit organizations can use the software for an affordable monthly price.

Meridian was instrumental in allowing us to test that model with Access to ID, and we have a couple of new projects that we have undergone. One is a gifting app to help agencies who are doing gifting programs, particularly at Christmas, and a radio app that helps community radio stations do their logging and their program management.

We are happy to be working with the National Campus and Community Radio Association to work on their technology plan to make a greater impact for community radio stations across Canada.

Thanks once again, Meridian, for providing this opportunity to us and to the other winners of the contest to basically show that business can be a force for good. Congratulations to this year's winners.