“Life is nothing without friendship”
Steve Bear, creator of the Alvie social network platform is living testament to this philosophy.
Having worked in the corporate sector and running his own IT firm most of his life, Steve felt that he wasn’t doing anything other than “making shareholders wealthy and earning a pay cheque” until attending a charity golf day. The funds raised went to the Sony Foundation to run camps for children with special needs. Curious, Steve asked about these camps and thought about his own kids who were attending high school.
Steve approached (“badgered”) their headmaster, proposing the school facilitate similar camps, where Year 11 students would be paired up with a child with special needs. Steve chased sponsorships, pulled together some nursing staff and volunteers and started the camp with 10 kids. Each pair kept a literal ‘arms-length’ for the duration of four days and three nights. Six years later, with 50 kids, this had become the largest annual camp for kids with special needs in Australia.
“Parents got a break, special needs kids got a four-day fantastic holiday, but one of the most important outcomes was that Year 11 students got a reality check on life. They got to see what goes on every day in some people’s lives,” Steve says.
“I got more out of the camp than anybody did so it was a little bit selfish. I ended up doing 30-hour weeks for 45 weeks a year running the camp, all volunteered ‘cause I just loved it so much.”
Steve left the camp in the school’s good hands in its 7th year to take a well-earned break. Still, it wasn’t long before he began volunteering for Make-A-Wish Foundation, continuing there for the next three years.
Those two experiences drove Steve to understand that life’s greatest challenges, especially for those with disabilities, are loneliness and exclusion.
“The number one mental health issue driver is loneliness, and that’s for all of us. We are creatures that love interaction. We like to be social. We need that social side to fulfill our happiest life,” explains Steve.
“You and I can go to the pub but how do you start a conversation with a stranger…multiply that by a hundred for people with disabilities.”
Steve then had the idea to develop a social platform specifically for Australians living with disabilities, and spent the next two years developing an app using his own funds.
Alvie was born. Alvie is a ‘friendship’ app, a groundbreaking platform to facilitate people with disabilities to make genuine friendships in a safe, easy and accessible way.
‘Alvie’, a German name, means ‘noble friend’ or ‘great friend'.
The key difference between Alvie and typical social media, is that Alvie has been developed with safety as the absolute priority and security is central to its design.
Users are screened with police checks and photo ID. Users aged under 18 must have a parent/guardian or support worker approve their registration. Over 18s can authorise support workers to their account.
Once registered, users can add interests and hobbies to their profiles so that they can match with those with similar interests and get the virtual ‘pub talk’ going. To reduce risk of bullying and exclusion, Alvie is strictly one-to-one conversation. There are no group chats. Additionally, Alvie has no video chat feature as it is too difficult to monitor and could also reveal personal information like a user’s location.
Interestingly, Alvie uses AI to screen for inappropriate images and language. Any inappropriate incoming content is blocked. Any potentially offensive outgoing content is highlighted. Alerts are sent to the profile’s authorised support system.
Since going live only in December last year, Alvie has already established a membership base of people ready to make friends. Even better, Alvie is free to use. No membership fees, no catches.
For Steve, the rewards are “making somebody smile, somebody happy. There are 4.4 million people living with a disability in Australia and I’d love to have 4.4 million on there. The aim is to help people make friends. End of story.”
Check out alvie.com.au