DIVAS Developing App to Help Girls Cope with Life’s Intimate Questions

The Digital Interactive Visual Arts and Sciences (DIVAS) for Social Justice organization works hard to teach youth in under-served neighborhoods how to use today’s technologies to promote social change. Their latest undertaking, under the DIVAS “Imaging Ourselves” program, is to create a mobile app which will answer the most personal and intimate questions girls have about themselves, their relationships, and the complex world around them.

The app will be called “My Sister’s Keeper” and will allow users to ask many questions which girls would otherwise have no one to ask due to their intimate and soul-searching nature. Under development in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn by documentary photographer and multimedia developer Murray Cox, “My Sister’s Keeper” will feature videos of different girls asking questions, and then cutting to women giving videotaped answers.

Under development since October, 2013, DIVAS held a crowd-funding campaign on Indiegogo to finance the app and hopes to release it to the general public in March to coincide with Womens’ History Month.   Youth members of DIVAS have been poring over questions that girls might ask themselves to choose the most critical ones for the app. They have been filming girls asking the questions and also the women who are giving loving, thoughtful answers to those questions which girls often ask themselves about body image, hair, and relationships.

The following description of “My Sister’s Keeper” comes from the Indiegogo site where donations to help create the app can be sent:

“The My Sister’s Keeper App will provide a platform for a global community of women and girls to receive loving affirmations about the questions young girls ask themselves growing up. Not everyone has a positive maternal confident to help answer their questions and DIVAS wants to help fill that void by creating a free mobile app where a young girl can ask a question about body image, relationships or just know someone loves them. The youth of the organization have been surveying their friends and providing the questions that all girls ask themselves and the organization has rallied a collective of health professionals to review content.”