HomeGrown App Wins NFP Big Idea Comp

An app to prevent food wastage is one of five winners in the Samsung and the Foundation for Young Australians (FYA) ‘Adappt Big Ideas’ competition.

Called HomeGrown Exchange, the app was created by Sonia Testa, her brother Patrick and James White from NSW who read about the competition at Pro Bono Australia News.

HomeGrown Exchange aims to prevent food wastage on a local level.

The judges said the app will directly benefit garden produce growers and consumers by enabling them to trade produce and create local economies with community members.

“By hosting a community of home gardeners Homegrown Exchange aims to support and encourage an appreciation of self-sufficiency and sustainability in the home,” they said.

Overall, the Adappt Big Ideas competition saw hundreds of young Australians aged between 12 and 25 enter their idea for an app that would affect positive social or environmental change.

Following a six-week competition period, the five winning app ideas, ‘Kanga Merri Nurndine’ (Talk, Hear, Forever), ‘Better Practice, Better Care’, ‘Take10’, ‘Study Songs’ and ‘Homegrown Exchange’ were chosen with teams recently convening in Melbourne for the Adappt Bootcamp, where they were mentored and coached by a range of prominent Australian digital agencies –plus Samsung and the FYA – seeing their app ideas developed into digital prototypes.

FYA Project Manager, Brigid Canny said the initiative with Samsung, to build social change apps, had a strong focus on enterprise skills that the young people can take into their future careers.

The other four Adappt Big Ideas competition winners were:

Kanga Merri Nurndine (Talk, Hear, Forever)

Created by: Shakara Toby, Stewart Escott and Pearl Escott QLD

Kanga Merri Nurndine was created to ensure that young people on Mornington Island have access to their culture, history, language and dreamtime stories. This app would store the language and culture into an online database and would make it easy for young Indigenous Australians to access culture at anytime, anywhere – even when they are out bush and have no phone reception. This app has found a way for community elders and young people to share knowledge together.

Better Practice, Better Care

Created by: Jacob Thomas, Michael Winn and Jamison Parker, VIC

Better Practice, Better Care is an app that aims to assist young LGBTQIA+ community members in locating friendly and supportive General Practitioners around Australia. Users would be able to locate their nearest service provider by using a postcode search on the app. Following appointments, users will also be able to rate the service through a brief survey.

Study Songs

Created by: Tyra Pederson and Brooke Weekes, NSW

Study Songs is about combatting problems commonly faced by students around exam periods and studying. The app idea aims to help reduce stress, help increase memory capacity and compress piles of study notes and heavy books into a single song. Once developed, the app will utilise a ‘beat maker’, meaning the user would be able to create their own beat, or play their notes to the beat of their favourite song.

Take10

Created by: Kathy Molla-Abassi, NSW

Take10 aims to stop people from making rash decisions and prevent feelings of loneliness, isolation, anger or procrastination by forcing the user to stop and count to 10 to re-focus. Users create albums of 10 photos with some emotional significance. The album will play as a 10 second slideshow (i.e. one picture per second) as needed when the mood calls for it.