Kinnd

Kinnd is combating the growing epidemic of loneliness by completely re-imagining the digital friend-making experience. Currently, friendship apps are based on "swiping culture." We are judging each other based on a photo and a few words in a bio, but we are all so much more valuable than that. My company Kinnd is re-humanizing digital friend-making by positioning mutual vulnerability, generosity, and reciprocity at the center of how you make a new friend online. If we are selected as a winner, the Elevate Prize funding will take our thriving community of 8500 members from 100 countries (in only 8 months) from our Facebook Group as well as our current MVP of our friend-finding assessment and will allow us to launch our app so that we help everyone realize that they are lovable, they don't need to feel lonely and that they won't once they realize how much they have to offer and how much they deserve to receive. We are currently building our app based on a team of volunteers (we ALL met through Kinnd). With this funding, we could transition to working on app development full time and get this much-needed solution to market, now. 

I started Kinnd at the onset of COVID because of having personally experienced the mental health impacts of prolonged loneliness while living in New York City from 2018 - February 2020. When I returned to Toronto and COVID hit, I knew that this period of physical isolation was going to affect millions of people’s well-being. Having tried current friendship apps to find a solution to my own loneliness I discovered that they are pretty much a copy and paste of dating apps, which not only makes the experience of online friend-making feel awkward but also doesn’t take into account the nuances of friendship. I knew another solution was needed, one that was designed to help people make meaningful, long-lasting relationships online. With 1/5 Canadians and 3/5 Americans self-reporting loneliness even prior to the pandemic, and knowing that loneliness is as bad for our health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, it was clear to me that we are living not only through a Global Pandemic, but a loneliness epidemic. Kinnd is my attempt to innovate on how we make friends digitally, which I truly believe will help to combat loneliness worldwide during the pandemic and beyond. 

Loneliness is truly a Global Epidemic. It has become such a clear problem that the UK and Japan have appointed loneliness ministers to their governments. It is as grave of a threat to public health as substance abuse and obesity and it transcends age, race, gender, and touches people around the world. Lonely people are more likely to become ill, to experience dementia, and to die earlier.

However thousands upon thousands of research studies show that social connectedness can mitigate all of the harmful impacts of prolonged loneliness. The quality of our relationships, the perception that support is available when we need it and the consistency we have with the relationships in our lives are all associated with longevity. 

Kinnd is solving for the epidemic of loneliness by completely re-inventing digital friend-making. Instead of matching people based on pictures or shared interests (which are poor indicators of compatibility), we match people based on their ability to exchange their skills, knowledge, and time/energy with one another. The best way to understand what we do is to check out our facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/group...

The core four pillars of Kinnd are Mutual Vulnerabilty, Generosity, Reciprocity, and Consistency. Through our friend-finding assessment which I developed through my Masters in Clinical and Counseling Psychology at Columbia University, our in-app icebreaker games, and the overall structure of how you meet people and connect with people on Kinnd, we embed these 4 elements into everything we build and offer. Unlike other friendship apps and platforms, we help people not only meet others but learn how to develop meaningful friendships that are not based on superficial things. 

While building our app, we launched the Kinnd Facebook Group to test our assumptions regarding our methodology for friendship. In 8 months we have grown to 8,500+ members, we've had 2,500 posts and almost 100,000 comments and reactions. We've had 100's of people reach out expressing that they've made friends, we've been featured on CTV Ottawa and Toronto, Global News, BlogTO and this week we are being featured as a Toronto Together Story on CTV highlighting how Kinnd is bringing people together during the Pandemic. It is clear that when people learn about Kinnd, there is an immediate interest because we are solving the challenge of loneliness in an innovative way. Moving forward we are planning to:

- Launch the Beta of our app - we have over 1,300 people ready to beta test. We have a current volunteer team, all members from Kinnd working on this which includes, 2 UX designers, 2 UI designers, a Backend Developer, a Game Designer, and a Product Manager (ex-senior product manager at eBay for 8 years) 

- Develop partnerships with governments and immigration services to let people know that Kinnd is available as an option to make new friends