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This year’s Tech4Good awards are hotting up, with a whole new group of amazing innovators hoping to be among the finalists. As one of last year’s winners we have been reflecting on the award and what it has meant to the team.

Winning the Tech4Good Community Impact Award

Mind Of My Own has won many awards since its inception in 2013. Winning the 2018 Tech4Good Community Impact Award 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 T4G award stood apart in a number of ways, one of which was the trophy, pictured above. 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 (or since!). All the winners were amazing and it was an honour and privilege to be counted among them.

Opportunities throughout the year

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, starting with the winners dinner in September. In November we attended TechSharePro 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.

Next steps for Mind Of My Own

All the people who make up our Mind Of My Own community were incredibly supportive of us during the re-brand that we had to undertake in such a hurry earlier this year. 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 successfully translated into Welsh).

Thank you Ability Net

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 Ability Net!

A version of this blog also appears on the T4G website

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