Inside:A Letter from the CEOPrototyping UpdateRIME: Our Innovation PipelineCompetitions and AccoladesHow You Can HelpContact

India: our third visitOn November 4th, the CentriCycle team of Carolyn Yarina, CEO, and Katie Kirsch, Business Operations Manager, embarked on the compa-ny’s third trip to India. Our trip will be three months long and focus on finishing up some product design and prototyping (see the Prototype Update on page 3), and formalizing distribution and education part-ners. As we are also traveling to a new area, Tamil Nadu, where we will also perform observations in primary healthcare centers and mobile clinics to determine if the clinical practices are similar to those in Kar-nataka where past interviews and observations were made. We are also lucky enough to be hosted by a group of engineers in India who have of-fered pro-bono design and plastics assistance. Together, they have over sixty years of engineering experience and they will be a great resource to create our final product via India manufacturers. We are very excited to start CentriCycle’s next phase with their help!

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Meet the New Member of our Team: Katie KirschWe recently hired a new Business Operations Manager, Katie Kirsch. Katie has expertise in education, publishing, and managing intercul-tural initiatives. Her focus will be on fund-raising, partnership devel-opment and the education aspect of CentriCycle’s holistic model. She recently returned from a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Rwanda where she taught university classes and managed the first published literary journal through the National University of Rwan-da. Katie also has experience working with government agencies and NGO’s in Cameroon, Suriname and Rwanda.

Katie Kirsch, our new Business Operations Manager, pictured here with Divine in Kibun-go, Rwanda.

Special Thanks to:• Our hosts in India: Mr. Kanda Muniasamy,

Mr. Prakash Katama and Mr. Bhaskar Reddy

• The Michigan Women’s Foundation, Walsh Institute and other supporters of Entre-preneur-YOU

• Impact Engine and 1871• Our Board of Directors: Rachel Deming,

JD, Wayne Harvey• Dr. Jai Ganesh, PhD, MBA• Lizzie Yarina for her pro-bono design work

Carolyn and Katie in Chennai, we arrived on November 6th.

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Letter from the CEOStarting a company isn’t easy. The first five months of CentriCycle as an official company have been full of ups, where I feel the urge to high-five random people on the street (but settle for a fist-pump and skip-ping down the street); and downs where I have questioned the slight insanity that leads me to start an international social venture for med-ical devices in the rural developing world straight out of college. The victories, both large and small, keep me going and come in many forms: the new connections, the random emails I receive that say “I love what you’re doing” “when will your product be ready to buy” or just “keep up the good work,” and seeing CentriCycle progress into a reality. All our progress is like a roller coaster ride: excitement, adventure, prog-ress, and emotion. Sometimes you are making slow progress, nothing seems to go right, and then suddenly everything starts to fit together and rockets forward.

But what is holding us back? Mainly the thing that holds a lot of start-ups back: money. We have been living off of the start-up equivalent of Ramen Noodles and Mac and Cheese. We’ve gotten a lot of our ser-vices discounted or pro-bono, but as we grow, we are going to require enough funding to pay people what their services are worth. And that is where we are asking for your help. Though we have multiple possi-bilities for funding, a donation as small as $5/month can make a huge difference towards becoming a financially stable company with an im-pactful mission.

CentriCycle is on one of those upward swings at the moment. We are heading to India where we have a team of Indian engineers with back-ground in product design, plastics design, and experience working for GE, Nokia, and VeriSign. They have agreed to volunteer their time to finish the final design of our fourth iteration because they believe in CentriCycle’s mission. We are hopeful we will have a fully-functioning prototype, formalized partnerships, and everything we need set-up to hit the ground running when we return from this trip in February. Ex-pect big advances from CentriCycle in the next six months!

Thank you for your continued support, Carolyn YarinaCEO and Founder

STATS:In India, rural women are 132% more likely to face during pregnan-cy than urban women- often from a preventable, treatable disease.

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Prototype UpdateJenna Boeing, a recent Mechanical Engineering graduate from Univer-sity of Michigan, spent significant hours this past summer working on the 4th iteration of our design-Prototype Delta. Below, she discusses some of her experiences:

For the first half of the summer, I did a lot of background work on the design. I familiarized myself with the design and did background re-search primarily on injection molding design and gear train design. Ad-ditionally, I compared the specifics of both manual and low-end elec-tric tabletop centrifuges on the market comparing cost and rotation speed requirements for the clinics in Karnataka had been documented in past trips and I reviewed many of these observations. My task was then to translate those requirements into engineering specifications through benchmarking, research and talking to stakeholders in India.

Next, I began the designs from the ground level. I started generat-ing concepts through sketches and met with a plastics part designer with over thirty years of experience. Our discussions helped create a concept that would be injection moldable and cost effective. I start-ed brainstorming the layout of the design, and then moved into finer details such as fasteners. I produced a full-scale drafted sketch of the final design concept, along with the bill of materials. By the end of the summer, I was able to create a 3D model through Computer-Aided De-sign (CAD). This model will be brought to a group of engineers who will finish the design work in India. Though a full design analysis wasn’t complete this summer, I am confident that the final design is the best.

RIME: Our Innovation pipelineCentriCycle began its journey as a small student organization at University of Michigan. Even though CentriCycle is now a full-fledged company, we are still connected to University of Michigan’s students through Rural Innovations in Engineering or RIME. Their activities will include initial product/education plan de-velopment, market research on the ground via field visits, product refinement, and market implementation. This connection is important as many of our upcoming and innovative ideas will be pipelined through this organization. Their energy and cre-ativity will continue to invigorate our start-up in the coming years.

Prototype Delta; our fourth and latest iteration. Though we have several Indian engineers helping with developing the design further, the basic shape will remain the same.

STATS:

India has 21% of the global dis-ease burden

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Competitions UpdateThis past September, CentriCycle was honored as the winner of the Entrepreneur-YOU competition as a Social Mission sponsored by the Walsh Institute and the Michigan Women’s Foundation. E-YOU is a business plan competition for women entrepreneurs meant to encour-age women’s leadership in the business world. Jenna Boeing presented the project in the finalist round amid tense competition; 150 different business ventures were submitted from all across Michigan.

Jenna Boeing (bottom right) presented at the Entrepreneur-You Competition, winning CentriCycle the top $10,000 prize for Social Enterprises

STATS:CentriCycle has been actively working for over four years.

Other Accolades + Features• Featured in Pedal It! How Bicycles are

Changing the World, a children’s book

• Featured in Business Insider as a “Hot-test Start Up on College Campuses Right Now”

• Presented at Appropriate Healthcare Technologies for Developing Countries in London

• Featured in “Going Beyond Eco-Friendly” on University of Michigan’s Engineering Website

• Presented at U-Entrepreneurship Confer-ence sponsored by University of Michigan

CentriCycle is a social enterprise with ho-listic objectives. We are working to extend healthcare access throughout the Global South through the implementation of sim-ple, portable medical technology. Our ini-tiative starts in India.

ContactWebsite: centricyle.org

Email: carolyn.yarina@centricycle.org

Phone, India: (until Feb. 13th): +91.988.490.7034

Phone, US: (Katie: after Dec. 22): 1.269.370.1014

Phone, US: (Carolyn: after Feb. 14): 1.906.370.3975

Getting Involved:Join our Team! CentriCycle is recruiting additions to our finance, tech-nical, or legal team. Most of all, we look for passionate, tenacious, and self-motivated people. So even don’t fit in one of the aforementioned categories, shoot us an email!

Network! Interested in networking with us? Please send us an email or give us a phone call. We would love to talk to you!

Join our Advisory Board! Have experience in the field of non-profits, fundraising, finance, medical technology, or a field you think will help us grow? Interested in taking on a formal role and donating your exper-tise to CentriCycle? Contact us about joining our advisory board!

Donate! Go to our website and click on the Donate link at the bottom of the page. Our next funding goals will contribute to patenting our prototype and to establishing our base in India.