As a multidisciplinary entrepreneurship centre, the EPICentre is home to an array of different companies. Walkthrough the doors on any given day and find entrepreneurs working on start-ups in the tech sector, retail, education and even agriculture. Today we’re highlighting Bonnie McIntosh, owner and founder of ACE Community Health, a stakeholder engagement practice that partners with companies and organizations from all different industries to create products centred around health and wellness. “There are a lot of different things that can impact our overall health and wellness, for example, there is environmental factors, cultural factors, spiritual factors, physical factors and many more” said Bonnie “ACE Community Health partners with a number of different organizations and companies from all different sectors to develop wellness programs and wellness products that are aimed to empower people to live healthy and well”.
Bonnie has earned her Bachelor of Arts in Community Health from Brock University in St. Catherine’s, Ontario, a Masters Degree in Public Health from Westchester University in Pennsylvania and an MBA from the University of Michigan, Flint campus. Her vast training in the public health sector is what inspired her passion around health and wellness “I worked as a program manager at BC children’s hospital in Vancouver, Canada. It was through that entire experience that I realized my training could benefit organizations and businesses”.
Through ACE Community Health, Bonnie has helped develop programs for her clients and has seen them through all the way to the end a process which involves disseminating the evaluation of the program. “[I work on] the entire continuum of developing the program to evaluating the program. So that involves services like grant writing, developing data collection tools, doing data analysis, research evaluation, dissemination (actually getting the relevant research out there to different stakeholders). It also involves developing research ethics protocols and assembling a research team in order to do the study and develop the program order to make that project successful” said Bonne.
Bonnie is currently working on a clinical trial with the University of Michigan, Flint campus servicing a special population that wasn’t being serviced as well when it came to health education around preventing further exposure to the lead in their water. “That population was English as a second language population. ACE Community Health partnered with linguistics faculty at the University of Michigan and also partnered with the Genesee County Hispanic Latino Collaborative Community Program in order to develop an NIH funded program and also evaluate it”.
With a passion for research and product development and her experience in the field, entrepreneurship seemed like a no-brainer to Bonnie. She saw a need to help empower people within communities to live healthy and well. “A lot of programs are just solely focused on environmental health or physical health and I’ve had opportunities that have allowed me to work on a number of different health issues with programs but I saw that there was a need for a business that could address multiple health and wellness issues,” said Bonnie.
Although she is not a University of Windsor graduate, her husband is. The two of them spent a lot of time here while her husband worked towards his Mechanical Engineering degree
at the University of Windsor “when I thought of a community that would make sense and would be a great place for me to build ACE Community Health, Windsor was the first place that came to mind” she said. Bonnie is currently a member of the EPICentre’s Incubation program, a program that provides start-ups with support and resources to grow their ventures through mentoring, workshops, seminars, networking opportunities and more “Ace community health is growing and we’re very passionate about health and wellness” said Bonnie “This partnership that we have with the EPICentre has been really instrumental in helping to facilitate our success”.
To learn more about ACE Community Health, please visit their website: https://www.acechealth.com/
To learn more about the EPIC Incubation program, please visit our website: https://www.epicentreuwindsor.ca/epic-incubation-program/
