Apart of me: Helping families talk about death

Bounceworks is a company dedicated to making digital products that build emotional resilience and wellbeing amongst children. Our first project is Apart of Me; a safe, virtual space that helps children that have suffered bereavement. It’s a platform game for IOS and Android.

We won a grant from the Nominet Trust in March 2016 and we built our game to prototype level by the start of 2017. The game is a donation-based, charitable enterprise - we want to make sure the game is free to all that need it and want to use it.

How did Apart of me start?

Back in  2015,  our co-founder, Louis Weinstock, a trained psychotherapist and counsellor specialising in children and young families, was working in a hospice. He was asked to look into digital alternatives to traditional therapeutic practices.

About the same time, Louis met a boy there who had just had the news his father had terminal cancer and had gone from a high-achieving, happy young man to joining a gang and taking drugs  - his life had completely unravelled upon the news.

Later that year, Louis met our other co-founder, Ben Page, a software developer with a rich history in technology and specifically writing games and software.

And we’ve flown and expanded the vision since then!

Why is Apart of Me so desperately needed?

41% of children in the Youth Offending Service have had a close family bereavement, a truly scary statistic. This alone makes it an incredibly important issue to address. This matter is compacted further with poor access to any kind of therapy for underprivileged children and it is them we really want to get to and therefore so important our service is free and on easily-accessed, digital platforms.

Looking to the future, mental health costs are likely to reach $6 Trillion by 2030. Solutions like ours are desperately needed in the hugely under-researched, undereducated, and underfunded area of mental health. We are at a critical moment and this is exactly the right time to make a huge, positive impact within this field. We feel the digital landscape is the only way to truly engage and remedy this successfully.

What’s happening next?

Following the success of the prototype, we launched a crowdfunding campaign to fund the costs of developing the 4 specific functions to our game. This was a truly incredible experience for us! Our social media campaign reached far and wide. We got support from Stephen Fry and Jon Snow amongst many others and were overwhelmed by contacts from other bereavement charities, and contacts stretching across the charitable and private sector. Amazingly, we exceeded our target and so funded the first of our 4 functions. The work is happening on this right now!

What will the future bring?

We want to be the go-to digital service for wellbeing and mental health amongst children with our range of digital products both in the UK and beyond.

We have just been featured in The Guardian as ‘tech to look out for in 2018’. We’re racing towards our goal at an incredible pace!

Find out more about Apart of Me: https://bounce.works/apartofme/

Photo Credit: Apart of Me
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