Myne-Poverty Stoplight Integration

This project aims to increase personal freedom and activate personal action through an integration of two easily accessible technologies – Myne and Poverty Stoplight. Myne is an agency-oriented software using proven gamification techniques to empower participation in personal transformation. Poverty Stoplight is a global movement with an effective bottom-up methodology and technology platform that activates the potential of families to identify and own their poverty-related challenges.

This project aims to address the lack of personal autonomy within the current systems targeted at poverty reduction by joining two technologies, whose values are deeply connected, to achieve individual and system level transformation. The Myne Community App will integrate with the Poverty Stoplight tool, showing the Client Life Map, priorities, and relevant resources. Our goal is to directly connect participants to their individualized resources and show the impact of daily decisions on large goals in a smaller feedback loop. It will include gamification features that are widely used across the for-profit sector but less well utilized in social services. Three pilot projects will focus on key stakeholders: funders, organizations and with a primary focus on  participants’ use and outcomes. Pilots will be in the UK Poverty Stoplight hub, Signal and US, including Texas hub, Dallas Lights.

Myne has three principles that govern its development and are part of its measurement strategy:

• Developing and deepening Ownership of personal choices and sense of agency (it is mine).
• Discovery: the process of collecting, seeing, and reflecting on data about ourselves helps us to understand our behaviors, attitudes, and mindsets better (mining for knowledge)
• Community: a network of trusted relationships that provides a secure environment i.e. our social capital is important (mining is not successfully done alone).

The Myne Community App provides a means to record, track, and measure the smaller actions of our daily lives, the activities we undertake regularly, and the moments that we acknowledge for ourselves. This can then be visualized to show the tangible progress that is happening. While small and often unnoticed, these moments add up to significant change. Similar to a dieter's decision to stick to an eating plan, when the scale begins to show small increments of progress (a visual representation of the progress), these small moments encourage someone to continue on a new path that is right for them.

Contribution to enhancing freedom

We believe Myne and Poverty Stoplight can, together, have a significant local and global impact on the everyday lives of individuals, creating personal freedom through increased agency and ultimately drive systems change at multiple levels.

Myne is a step towards the dignity, confidence, and empowerment that characterizes this enhanced freedom. It shows individuals how their work of showing up, persisting, progressing, and achieving goals within safe relationships can add up to healthier outcomes. For all stakeholders, it encourages participation in an ecosystem that helps families and communities to thrive. Myne shows how small-scale events and activities (that are often overlooked) are significant steps to an individuals’ achievement (research shows us these are the building blocks of building confidence). Combining this with Poverty Stoplight’s ability to visualize self-driven goals through its Stoplight Life Map will produce a powerful data-driven, relationship-based, and bottom-up approach to personal liberty and self-directed poverty alleviation.

Without personal autonomy, individuals will show some progress in traditional, particularly data-extractive only programs. However, they are more likely to revert to their previous circumstances as soon as the strict parameters of the program are removed.  With personal autonomy, an individual is more likely to experience sustained progress and change as they typically choose goals that will fit within their current parameters. 

Daron Babcock, CEO Bonton Farms, and member of Dallas Lights, connects Myne with that principle: “We believe deeply in the idea that we should not do for others what they are capable of doing for themselves. However, [sometimes we can] rob them of the dignity, confidence and empowerment that comes with an “honorable exchange.” The…Myne app… would allow us a way to quantify and track the work that is done by people, so we can empirically show them that they are responsible for their success; that it is earned and not gifted.”

On a larger level, as more communities begin to use the tool, data points about community, country and regional needs will develop. As multiple nonprofits within a city begin to use the tool, data points will begin to show if self-identified needs have commonality by region. Example: The south side of the city self-reports the need for jobs, whereas the north side of the city reports the need for childcare. Utilizing these data points, funders may target their support to programs that provide assistance with these targeted needs, thereby creating systems level shifts in program implementation.