curaJOY 24/7 One-Stop Emotional Wellness Support For All

Families’ Declining Mental Health and The Inadequate Current Approaches to Care

Approximately 39% of children ages 5-17 experience emotional distress, 17 percent have some social or emotional delay, and more than 14% of children worldwide have learning differences like ADHD, autism, dyslexia. The number of adolescents with mental health issues has increased by 71% from 2008 to 2017, with the more severe cases considering suicide is also up by 47%.  These numbers have only increased since the pandemic.

Up to 83% of moms report feeling burnt out, which is alarming because children’s emotional well-being is interconnected with their parents.  Sadly, <20% of the children who need mental health support are getting care. Barriers to care include limited financial resources, time constraints, cultural stigma, language barriers, technology gap, lack of family support, fear of being labeled, and insufficient parental education.  These barriers are especially salient where help is most needed–in poor, racial minority, and multicultural communities.

How we feel about ourselves, interact with others, and overcome obstacles in life makes an enormous difference in our ability to be happy and succeed. The connection between crime, poverty, violence, and mental illness has been well documented, but current methods have not declined rates of mental illness or cost of care. 

curaJOY seeks to solve the problems of declining family mental health and the lack of inclusive and accessible emotional wellness support for families, leading to disconnected families, poor mental health, increased crime, and financial instability.  We intend to scale family emotional wellness globally by creating a digital conversational learning platform that prioritizes personalization and real-life practice. We believe our preventative and root-cause approach to mental health and family emotional wellness is a more effective, efficient, and economical solution.

Barriers to solving these problems:

·         Resource Limitations: No current solution works without involvement from parents and teachers.  Our education system struggles enough with core subjects and shouldn’t shoulder the responsibility of social-emotional education. 

·         Non-inclusive resources: Current social-emotional learning resources lack multicultural representation and do not address the specific issues important to immigrant, multicultural, and minority families. Without appropriate representation, children in these families don’t get the necessary assistance, and their families are also more likely to reject the resource.

·         Lack of family engagement: The current support primarily targets students. Doing so limits families from making necessary adjustments in their interaction patterns to heal and grow together. 

·         Instruction without mastery: School social-emotional learning programs don’t give children the opportunity to apply what they learn to real-life scenarios, practice, and actually benefit from the learning.

curaJOY’s Quest Depot helps families connect better and enhance their emotional wellness 24/7 with an omnichannel conversational learning app that integrates Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, real-life projects and rewards, and social-emotional education. Participants interact with in-game embodied agents who deliver personalized content sourced from the collective wisdom of psychologists, educators, business leaders, and youth worldwide, based on their age, communication style, chief concerns, and mood. 

Because there isn’t one person or approach that fits all, Quest Depot houses virtual characters from different races, ages, genders, and socioeconomic backgrounds to build rapport and guide participants on their emotional wellness journey.  3D animation and visual cues, such as customizable avatars for users and chatbots, will also support authenticity and relatable connection. 

Features

• Chunking of social-emotional curriculum into “snack-sized” conversations delivered via our natural language processing (NLP) omnichannel embodied agents (chatbots) rather than lengthier, traditional course formats
• Assistance to optimize relationships with friends and family and re-train unhealthy communication patterns based on everyone’s personality type and communication style.
• Guided goal creation, progress tracking, mood check-ins, problem-solving reflections
• Reward system for family and friends to sponsor positive behaviors and form bonds through automated shared updates
• Accessible across platforms most preferred by our target audience (web, WhatsApp, Facebook, SMS)
• Available in English, Spanish, Chinese (more to come)

With Quest Depot, curaJOY serves school-age children 7 to 18 years old and their families.  Today’s busy parents are limited in their ability to fully develop their children’s social-emotional skills, as well as their ability to care for their own mental health.  Families often don’t have the time or money to receive sufficient care. Our health care system is also overburdened and fraught with long waiting lists and limited availability.

One of curaJOY’s first target audiences is Asian-Americans and multicultural immigrant families. This population has been especially hard hit by COVID-related discrimination, trauma, and hate crimes.  Asians are amongst the US’ fastest-growing ethnic demographic yet are the least likely to seek out mental health support.

Because we are building our solution to be digital, multilingual, and omnichannel, it can easily and quickly scale globally. With each additional available language, Quest Depot serves even more communities worldwide.

Our Audiences:

• Families with school-age children
• Youth with parents who do not recognize their need for behavioral interventions, mental health care, or are unable to provide access.
• Parents with special needs children
• Families seeking healthier, stronger connections with their kids but are having problems due to lack of free time or own insufficient social-emotional skills
• Grandparents and extended family who wish to feel closer to their school-age relatives.

How does our solution address their needs?

• Available and accessible 24/7.  No need to coordinate schedules.
• Science-based.  Developed with a team of clinical psychologists, education specialists.
• Effective, personalized learning.  Minimal time required of parents and families.
• Flexible and adaptable to changing needs.
• Designed from a kid and family’s point of view, rather than top-down (government, insurance, clinician).
• Immediate implementation - Easy (nothing) to adopt.
• Multilingual in English, Spanish, and Chinese, with more languages in the works.
• Diverse representation and inclusive content.
• Affordable solution (heavily subsidized or full scholarship)

Started by two minority working women with children on the autism spectrum, curaJOY actively involves voices–youth, gender, and minority families–that are often overlooked in our program’s content and development. 

curaJOY’s founder, Caitlyn Wang, is an Asian American based in California who has worked and parented in the US and Asia and is intimately familiar with each region's psychoeducational resources. Caitlyn has managed marketing, product development, and supply chain in the audio/video industry with teams in China, Taiwan, Mexico, and the US to bring products to market for companies like Harman, Acer, and Amazon.  Our co-founder, Sherry Hsia, is based in Taiwan and the founder of Baiyan Global Consulting, specializing in talent development, DEI interventions, and former Director of the International Bridge Program Kaiping Culinary School. 

In 2021, while families worldwide contended with COVID, curaJOY surveyed parents, educators, mental health professionals, and students to design a practical solution that would immediately impact their emotional wellness and create lasting change by working backward from the problems families want to solve and the improvements they wish to see when we couldn’t find an adequate existing solution on the market. curaJOY is conducting a pilot study beginning May 2022 to assess Quest Depot’s effectiveness in achieving the program’s goals and will adjust the instructional content and AI algorithms accordingly. curaJOY will always be guided first and foremost by our mission to provide families with a one-stop solution to raise socially and emotionally thriving human beings. 

The barrier to entry in tech is very steep for female minorities mothers coming from the outside.  We started curaJOY with blind passion and desperation for a currently non-existent solution, and truly believe that an emotional wellness program that provides transformative self-learning should exist for all families to benefit.  Therefore, curaJOY welcomes strategic advice and partnership guidance in our go-to-market approach and fundraising to ensure our sustainability as a non-profit, so business interests can be left out of building families’ emotional wellness and raising thriving kids.  

Also, as a nonprofit startup, we've depended heavily on volunteers and offshore freelancers who aren’t familiar with agile development.  Participation in MIT’s Solve can give curaJOY the much-needed technical assistance with our app development. We also seek any help available in AI/ML for our social-emotional learning curriculum design.  The publicity MIT Solve could give curaJOY would bring more awareness to our mission to build minority families’ emotional wellness and jumpstart our fundraising.

Quest Depot is an always-available, multilingual, omnichannel emotional wellness program that incorporates AI/ML in the form of embodied agents (chatbots) with advanced Natural Language Processing capabilities to converse with participants and teach via the Socratic method.  Our program content has been sourced from psychologists, business leaders, and youth across cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds. We have also incorporated an equal representation of gender, race, and age as embodied agents to fill the DEI gaps that currently exist in the SEL space. Providing our AI with real-life starting points from multiple experts of diverse backgrounds allows people of all ages, races, genders to feel genuine connections to Quest Depot and be ready to learn.   curaJOY’s program is flexible with limitless content potential and serves as an opportunity to open new perspectives to families.

What Makes Us Special?

• Transformational - Experiential learning

Many parents learn through trial and error that weekly therapy sessions alone cannot deliver the transformations they hoped for.   Interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence can’t be taught through lectures and video lessons – children need opportunities to practice! curaJOY creates simulated and real-life experiences that facilitate the learning and mastery of skills like impulse control, problem-solving, making friends, decision making, and bouncing back from hardships.  Our program also necessitates the continued practice of learned skills in real life and offline social interactions.

• Diverse and inclusive - For All Families

Many communities also harbor cultural stigmas against psychotherapy and the mental health fields.   Children depend on their caregivers to recognize and accept the need for and importance of building emotional wellness.  Rather than attempting to change or eliminate existing biases, we re-frame the purpose and benefits of social-emotional learning to appeal to universally accepted values like success and growth.  Our content is scientifically sound and inclusive.  We localize it to be developmentally and culturally appropriate. The availability of curaJOY’s programs in multiple languages with diverse experts, inclusive content enables all families to enhance their emotional wellness, regardless of language, race, technology fluency. 

• Kid-centric, family-centered

Family members’ mental health is interconnected.  Solutions that only work on children are limited in their impact when there often exists aggravating conditions in children’s environments.  Therefore, curaJOY works with the whole family, and families need solutions that integrate seamlessly into their existing lifestyle and schedule rather than another “add-on” that they need to squeeze into the calendar.  All other current resources–like private counseling, in-home behavior therapy, guided journals, social skills groups–require the parent’s involvement and time, but not all families have the resources to develop healthy emotional wellness in their children. curaJOY delivers a done-for-you, effective emotional wellness support program where parents are free to participate as little or much as they want.

• Omnipresent, 24/7, End-to-End Solutions

Help is often needed when a therapist, friend, or teacher is not available, and it’s no secret that people reveal more behind the privacy of their screens.  We make it easy for families to connect better and enhance emotional wellness by making our program accessible online or via Facebook, Discord, WhatsApp, Line, and text -- 24/7 to assess, learn, and practice interpersonal and EQ skills.  curaJOY’s extensive privacy safeguards and anonymity options also make it possible to extend mental health help to the most reluctant population.

Impact Goals for Next Year

• Support the emotional wellness of parents and children 24/7 with Quest Depot, an evidence-based, end-to-end solution
• Teach positive coping skills and encourage self-care through Quest Depot in English and Chinese
• Offer relief to people who feel isolated (physically, socially, or emotionally, for example, children with autism) and give them a sense of belonging
• Help promote authentic and healthy social interactions with their family and friends through Quest Depot

Impact Goals for the Next 5 Years

• Build families’ emotional wellness globally with our one-stop conversational social-emotional learning program, Quest Depot, in five additional languages
• Create 6 additional virtual conversational therapeutic guides from different backgrounds (Currently, we have a female cognitive behavior therapist/counselor, a male acceptance-commitment therapy coach, a grandfather character co-created by three retired CEOs, a refugee, a Holocaust survivor, a co-created South American young professional, a co-created Asian American, and a co-created Chinese youth.
• Roll out issue-specific modules in Quest Depot to resolve common family conflicts (i.e., marital finances, parental duties division, sibling rivalry)

The project outcomes will be measured by:

• The number of users acquired
• Parent-reported improvement in children’s mood and behavior
• The number of people who report the app to have helped decrease stress or maintain social connections

Quest Depot incorporates a baseline assessment at the start, then surveys all users at regular intervals after using the app to assess how it has helped them individually and as a family in mood, stress, anxiety, and communication.  curaJOY updates Quest Depot curriculum content at least twice a year.

Our pilot study, scheduled for June 2022, will assess Quest Depot’s effectiveness in achieving the program’s goals, and curaJOY will adjust the content accordingly.

Families with school-age children struggle to maintain healthy emotional wellness, and the impacts of COVID have further exacerbated their mental health, which leads to far-reach societal consequences.  Racial and gender minorities and disadvantaged communities need the most help yet face the steepest barriers to care, including poverty, time constraints, cultural stigma, language barriers, technology gap, lack of family support, and current methods of support are inadequate, inaccessible, inefficient, and un-inclusive. 

curaJOY builds global families’ emotional wellness by providing them with an accessible, one-stop solution to raise socially and emotionally thriving human beings. Our digital conversational learning program, Quest Depot, helps children and parents feel better and connect more through science-based, personalized social-emotional education that incorporates real-life practice and rewards from a diverse team of psychoeducational experts worldwide.  Quest Depot helps families track moods, learn self-care strategies, set goals, track progress, pivot after setbacks, maintain regular social contact, realize the power of their actions, recognize unhealthy interaction patterns and gain insights into family personality dynamics.

Our success depends on curaJOY’s ability to raise sufficient funds to achieve the ambitious integration of different technologies and the program’s ability to create realistic human-like interactions of inclusive and diverse embodied agents for participants to easily build rapport with the platform.

curaJOY leverages the best of science and technology to drive our mission.  The core technology that is currently used in Quest Depot includes AI/Machine Learning, omnichannel messaging, Natural Language Processing, headless approach, conversational design, and 3D animation.

curaJOY was created, largely, in response to the lack of diversity, equity, and inclusivity in the social-emotional learning, and mental health fields. We value those with direct experiences with the problems we’re trying to solve.  Two months since we started publicly operating last November, we attracted more than 200 college-educated volunteer applicants and accepted 57 volunteers from 16 different countries, with 45% holding advanced graduate degrees.   curaJOY’s values and authentic passion for its mission imbue through our team culture, program development, marketing plan, etc.  Internally, curaJOY runs a youth internship program called Youth Ambassadors that empowers minority youth to learn project management, participate in product development and receive mentoring support from seasoned professionals.  We are doers.   

We believe our preventative and root cause approach is a more effective, efficient, and economical solution to mental health and DEI issues

curaJOY is an embedded model social enterprise with a multi-prong revenue model that includes grants, program subscription sales, corporate sponsorships, individual donations, and content partnerships.  We believe in building alliances whenever possible, rather than wasting, producing excess, duplicating efforts, and aim for a geographically equitable funding model as well. Our digital program adopts a Software As a Service subscription model.

After curaJOY reaches its initial fundraising goal, we already assessed and planned for Quest Depot’s subscription model to sustain our continued development and still meet our public service objective. The financial support, training, and publicity from MIT Solve will also help jumpstart curaJOY’s fundraising from corporations and private foundations in Asia who look to well-respected US leaders as beacons. Our core team will be reaching out through their personal, professional networks, collaborating with secondary schools worldwide, starting with Asia and North America. We aim for a geographically equitable funding model.

Up to 2022, we have focused on scoping, designing an inclusive and equitable emotional wellness solution that will make a lasting impact, and began informally raising funds starting in March 2022. Please find below our current and anticipated sources of support.

Funders: 

1. Received: $75,000 received from individuals. 

2. Pending/Anticipated: 

• $80,000 from individual donors in 2022. 

• $300,000 from foundation funding, corporate sponsorships in 2022.  We are pursuing YCombinator, Future Fund, Cisco, Amazon Imagine Grant and plan to apply to 15 other smaller grants this year.

Partners: 

Atlassian Engage4Good

Omnis Health

Catchafire