 So welcome everybody and in this demonstration style of that my name is Aaron Ford and I'm learning and development manager here at TechSoup. I'm also an organizer of Alphabet Soup which is TechSoup's LGBTQ Plus Affinity Group. Let's welcome Jonathan McKay, executive director, same-same. Jonathan McKay, known to friends as Jono, is a designer and social entrepreneur working at the intersection of digital technologies and social change. With more than 20 years of experience working across both the private and public sectors, he brings his background in marketing, content creation and user experience design to bear on a diverse range of development challenges with a particular focus on the LGBTQI Plus community. Jono will share the story behind the development of a WhatsApp chatbot that provides young LGBTQI Plus people in South Africa with access to identity affirming evidence-based cognitive behavioral therapy course. Thanks to everyone at TechSoup for the invitation and to everyone here for your attention. I'm also here with my co-founder, Dean of Patrice, who will be handling the Q&A. Before we get going, we have a video to play. I've been in South Africa for five years now, born and raised in Uganda. I first realized that I was different from other boys when I was in high school, but I would always run away from it. It kept on building. I didn't know how to speak about certain things. In fear, if I say this, I am going to be beaten. In Uganda, there isn't so many places that you can go to for queer therapy. I joined same-same a few weeks after I had come out to my family. It made me feel so confident in who I am, not just about my sexuality. I really feel like same-same is a friend. The parliament of Uganda decided to pass the death penalty, which has led to a lot of fear. My hope for the future is to be able to be a voice for those who can't speak out to themselves, to show people different shades of love that it's possible. Dina and I co-founded same-same because we believe that every young person deserves a chance to reach their potential, no matter who they are, no matter where they live, no matter who they love. To help them do just that, the team at same-same have created a WhatsApp chatbot that provides LGBTQI plus young people with access to private and safe, identity-affirming and critically locally relevant mental health support in the palm of their hands whenever they need it. Being a teenager is difficult for everyone, but it is especially challenging for those of us who are queer. In South Africa, where I'm from, queer youth suffer from depression at four times the rate of appeals. When I was growing up in South Africa, struggling with my sexuality, I knew exactly where the one gay bookstore was, where the one LGBT-friendly clinic was. But like most young people, fear of stigma and discrimination and even the threat of violence kept me from accessing the services that I needed. Now, there are a host of new digital mental health services that are providing a model for the way that we can reach young people where they are. But none of these services cater to the specific needs of young people living in places where it's not just difficult to be different, sometimes it is even illegal. Same-same, we know that context matters. That's why we're using WhatsApp, because it's already on everyone's phone, so it's accessible in places where people don't have access to the latest devices. It's end-to-end encrypted, which means that it's safer, and it's light on data, which makes it affordable for young people to access in places where data charges still present a significant obstacle to people accessing online support. Even when our services are free, at the core of our chatbot is an adaptation of an eight-session identity-affirming cognitive behavioral therapy course that has been proven to boost the mental well-being of LGBTQI plus young people in multiple randomized controlled trials. Wrapped around this course, we've got stories from users like King who you saw in the video, stories that help young people feel seen and connected, and that lead them to essential information about gender and sexuality that is locally relevant. Information that, when they are ready, takes them to links to offline resources and on-the-ground service providers who can support them on the next stage of their journey. Young people discover us through social media campaigns, through youth ambassadors, and through partnerships with on-the-ground organizations. We've been live in South Africa for just a few months, and the young people there are meeting a bot that's been built by a team of queer clinicians, software engineers, and product designers who have come together to build what we wish we had when we were growing up. And thanks to our efforts so far, over a thousand young people over the last three months in South Africa have started conversations with our bot, conversations that have the potential to be life-changing. We have funding and support for our work in South Africa and in Zimbabwe, but we have big ambitions to make our service available everywhere that young people experience fear and discrimination because of who they are. And that might include Angola, Kenya, Nigeria. Eventually we want to be everywhere that young people need us so that we realize, yes, we might all be a little bit different, but ultimately we are all the same-same. I've got a slide here with a QR code that you can use to interact with our chatbot prototype in South Africa. In South Africa we're called Fana Fana, which is a direct translation of same-same, and that's the best way for you to see what we're actually building for young people. It's mostly English with some Zulu, but you should be able to still understand everything that's going on. And I'll just pause here a little bit to give you a chance to get hold of the QR code. Thank you so much for your time and attention everyone.