BRAVE UP!

Half of the world’s teenagers suffer violence at school, according to the UNICEF report, bullying disrupt the education of 150 million young people, that is why we created BRAVE UP!, a web platform shared with school staff to manage the relationships of the school community. Schools can prevent, detect and predict bullying and cyberbullying in just a few short steps. 
We have worked with more than 100 schools in Chile and we have impacted more than 60,000 students, with our technology and solution we can scale globally and changes the lives of millions of students. 

School violence is a reality, today more than 150 million young people in the world are victims of bullying. In Chile, according to the Ministry of Education, one in three students are victims of school violence and in Latin America more than 51% live the same experience. In the United States, 60% of young people claim to be victims of cyberbullying.

According to the superintendency of education in Chile, in 2020 the complaints of cyberbullying increased from 14% to 26%, where cyberbullying, grooming, sexting and hours in front of the screen increased alarmingly.

The pandemic generated by COVID-19 has increased the gap between the different educational establishments in terms of the ability to manage this coexistence, both due to new problems such as virtual bombing (a new type of cyberbullying), addiction to online games , the increase in stress, the decrease in concentration, mental health problems and the lack of tools and training for teachers, management teams and families, as well as technical differences to be able to carry out good management, with data, tools and support networks.

The BRAVE UP! It has different stages to be carried out in the educational community, the first phase is the enrollment of users, where each one can enter with their institutional email to make way for the diagnosis of emotional well-being. Then the platform begins to be managed by the counselor, where they use the available resources to work with students and teachers and manage the cases received through the BRAVE UP! MODE function, where students can report any day and at any time if are being victims or witnesses of bullying and cyberbullying. There is also the Sociograms function, which allows predicting situations of violence in each course, as well as positive and negative relationships. All BRAVE UP! Reports can be downloaded from the platform. DATA.

The possibility of predicting risk situations and alerting the communities allows having an effective and scalable way of preventing school violence both face-to-face and digitally, in addition to allowing 24/7 early warning of cases

The target population affected by this problem are all the members of the different educational communities, be they public or private, religious or not, regardless of their place, the number of students or the educational project, the problems in relationships in school is part of student life, of the way of living together.

In detail, those who we impact by solving this problem are the students of an educational community, their families, the teachers who teach them, the education assistants, the management and administrative team and all the school staff. A good school coexistence can even impact the neighborhood, the neighbors and providers of the educational establishment.

As you present it in the challenge, our problem that is bullying and cyberbullying is directly related to ensure the physical safety and mental health of learners. Practically explain one of our functions such as the BRAVE UP MODE! that allows students to report if they are being victims or witnesses of violence.

We know that today is a global reality and what we are looking for is through technology to be able to prevent and predict these risk situations, in order to have better learning spaces.

We are a start-up that has been innovating for years and working with schools to deliver the best solution to managing school coexistence, we started by delivering an app to students, then we strengthened our work by delivering an educational program to educational communities and finally we managed to pivot the current solution, with automated processes, validated by real users, with sales and with a scalable model in both the business model and the technology that supports the value proposition.

Currently there are already schools in Spain and the Dominican Republic using our platform and we plan not only to continue in Chile, but also in Mexico and the United States.

Our great innovation and differentiation is what we do in the BRAVE UP! DATA, where with our sociograms and algorithm we can predict situations of violence, know the positive and negative relationships and even help the teacher to organize the class. Our instrument of emotional well-being allows to know the perception of all the actors of the educational community, make better decisions and implement the correct interventions by class, level or even student.

The added value of our program comes, on the one hand, in not being satisfied with the reporting channel, but complementing this information with more data, with a work methodology that allows improving the indicators and providing tools to the educational community to manage the coexistence and not just putting out fires.

During 2020 our software was used by 40 schools, that is, 40 counselor team, 10,630 students, 3,409 families and 867 teachers who used each function.
During this year we are growing at a rate of 500 weekly users, we seek in the next year to have 50,000 users and we project that in 5 years we can have more than 1,500,000 users, that is, 3,000 impacted schools around the world.

Education team are 2 full-time sociologists and 2 full-time psychologists. The technology team are 4 full-time professionals, CTO and 3 developers between backend, frontend and UX/UI. Marketing has the CMO and a full-time salesperson and a designer and a part-time journalist to generate sales and brand positioning.

Our founding team has been working in the ecosystem of entrepreneurship and innovation for years. Álvaro has been chosen among the young leaders in Chile and Latin America, he is one of the most recognized social entrepreneurs in Chile. José has experience in SociaLab and has a Master's degree from NYU. Felipe is a political scientist from the University of Bologna and has experience working at the United Nations. Carlos has experience in content creation, he has made different scripts for television and digital media.

Our psychology team has studies abroad, with high experience in school coexistence and implementation of technologies in the classroom. Our team of sociologists has years of experience in renowned consulting firms in Chile and the IT team comes from large universities and Laboratoria.

The commercial team has had experience in recruiting students in universities, so they know the school world very well and our part time team is an artist with experience in different platforms and a journalism student that we plan to join the team full time.

We have a very diverse team, we have practically gender equality in the team, we have 2 female area directors and representatives of indigenous peoples in Chile and the LGBTQI + community.

We seek to be as inclusive as possible, very horizontal in the dealings and ways of collaborating. We seek to build school communities free from discrimination and we must start with our organization.