By Yvonne Anderson, Director and Co-Founder of Mind of My Own
Mind Of My Own (formerly known as ‘MOMO’, but more of that later) has won many awards since its inception in 2013. Winning the Community Impact Award for the Tech4Good awards was very special though: peer recognition that affirmed our mission of creating tech for social good.
Naturally we have been proud and honoured to have achieved all our awards over the past six years, but the Tech4Good award stood apart in a number of ways. Meeting the other finalists prior to judging was a bit different and a bit good! We loved mingling with our peers and competitors and started building some great relationships from that day. The awards event itself was enormous fun, especially the people’s vote which involved waving glow sticks around frantically – something we hadn’t encountered before. All the winners were amazing and it was an honour and privilege to be counted among them.
AbilityNet with their sponsors and partners created opportunities throughout the year for winners to meet with one another and benefit from networking, advice and mentoring from various industry experts. In November we attended Tech Share Pro and learned a huge amount about making our product accessible and inclusive by design.
As a result of T4G, Mind Of My Own buddied up with UK Youth and supported a young people’s hackathon. We are now members of UK Youth and look forward to more opportunities for working together.
The Mind Of My Own year was not entirely dominated by awards and in fact we experienced some very unexpected events when the so-called ‘momo challenge’ first started getting publicity back in the summer of 2018. Since beginning as a small grant funded project in 2013, we had been known affectionately as MOMO, but the unwelcome and negative publicity around the alleged ‘suicide game’ of the same name eventually left us with no choice but to change. After more than a week of constant media coverage of the ‘momo challenge’ – a dangerous internet hoax – we decided at the end of February to drop everything and completely re-brand. This was a huge and costly task and not to be repeated, we hope.
The users and customers who make up our Mind Of My Own community were incredibly supportive of us during the re-brand. Having turned that corner, we started out on our next steps, towards becoming a global entity. We had worked extensively with the New Zealand government in 2018 and are again in negotiation with children’s services in that country. Recently some of the team did a mini tour of Finland and we are currently translating our apps into Nordic languages (having last year translated into Welsh).
Mind Of My Own grows year on year and has more and more impact on young people’s lives by making sure their voices are heard. We are so proud of what we do and recognition such as the award from T4G is an enormous boost to the team’s confidence and job satisfaction. Thank you!
Are you inspired by Mind of My Own’s story? Enter the 2019 Awards by 13 May
Need more inspiration? Watch the recording from our ‘How to win a Tech4Good Award?’ webinar
