UPDATE 19th December 2018

Apart of Me is now available for iOS and Android!

See our https://apartofme.app for more details.

Thank you to all our backers, supporters and volunteers. Apart of Me would never have become a reality without you all.

UPDATE 18th November 2018

Apart of Me is now available for pre-order from the App Store and coming soon to the Google Play Store. See our https://apartofme.app for details.

UPDATE 8th November 2017

Our campaign target has been reached and we will soon be starting to work on the next phase of development. If you would like to donate to our work the best way is now via the official Apart of Me Donations page.

UPDATE 24th October 2017

Today we reached our initial target of £30,000. We are dancing off the walls. Thank you so much for your support so far. 

Now we are very excited to announce our first Stretch Goal: The Emotion Explorer.

For just £6,000 more we will be able to create this new feature in the game.

This feature will be an interactive game within the Apart of Me platform that encourages the user to develop emotional literacy around their grief, and develop strategies to find some peace within their emotions.

Users will help their character find a large net hidden somewhere on the island, we will populate the island with scores of multicoloured dancing butterflies which the users will be able to gently catch. Each butterfly will relate to a specific emotion, and will contain age-appropriate content that will help the young person build emotional literacy around grief. Users will be able to take each butterfly they catch back to the Cave and set it loose so it can find similar stories based on that emotion.

Hi. I'm Jamie.

I've been a Young Advisor to the Apart of Me project since it began. My dad died 2 years ago and it really affected me: I got kicked out of school, started hanging out with the wrong crowd, I felt depressed and hopeless. Since being involved in this project, I've started a course in Graphic Design at college and my life is getting back on track. I wish I'd had something like Apart of Me to guide me when my dad was ill. But I'm so happy to know that other young people like me in the future will have Apart of Me to help them find a way through their grief. Let me show you what the problem is, what we've done so far, and what we are going to do in the future.

Recently endorsed by

Apart of Me solves one of the hardest problems any parent can ever face: How to help your children grieve?

Imagine having to tell your children you have 6 months left to live. Is there a more difficult conversation a parent can have?

Here are some of the problems Apart of Me is helping to solve...

Please go to our faq section below if you want to know the references for these stats above.

We're a small, fast-moving team on a mission. Since winning a grant from the Nominet Trust, we've been squeezing the value out of every penny, and have achieved so much already.

When we started out, we formed a group of brilliant advisors: bereaved young people, parents and professionals. We realised there were some core aspects we needed to create:

1. A peaceful, safe virtual world that a young person can explore in their own time, at their own pace.
2. A way for users to find safe and meaningful ways to connect with other bereaved young people to reduce the sense of isolation.
3. A quest for the player to help explore their relationships in the real world, asking them to interact with loved ones in helpful and healing ways.
4. Evidence-based therapeutic exercises to help users understand and find peace with their emotions.
5. Helpful perspectives on grief and death in an engaging format.

These aims have translated directly into Apart of Me's core features:

The inside of the cave is a mysterious place for catching fireflies, exploring emotions, and hearing user stories from other young people around the world..

Each day, a new bottle arrives on the island, containing a quest for the hero. These quests encourage face-to-face connections with your parent(s), so that you can co-curate a beautiful treasure-chest of memories, and check in with these memories whenever you want. This feature is a digital version of the 'memory box' practice commonly used in grief counselling.

Find some peace with our mindfulness meditations designed to support the grieving process.

What happens when we die? Explore this big question by searching for the mysterious rocks on the island, listen to perspectives old and new, and develop your own understanding.

We made our prototype available for evaluation by interested organisations and professionals as well as young people and families in a variety of situations. We were stunned by how much demand we uncovered.

74% people would recommend the existing prototype to a family or young person who had someone close to them with a life-limiting illness. 

81% would recommend it with only one or two minor changes.

We now want to take the most successful aspects of our prototype and grow them into something amazing. We want to make the Apart of Me experience freely available for whoever needs it.

And here is the journey we have been on to get to this very exciting point:

These are some of the really exciting things we want to do in the future...

We are very lucky to have a small but brilliant team, including volunteers and part time freelancers and young ambassadors, who are really happy to support the project because they believe in what we're trying to do. Lets meet the founders of this project:

I'm Louis, and I'm cofounder of Bounce Works. I'm an experienced Child Psychotherapist, and I've spent my whole working life (that's almost 17 years) working with children and families who are marginalised. I was working in St Joseph's Hospice in Hackney counselling both families where a parent had a terminal illness and bereaved young people. I saw how the young people I was working with were just a tiny fraction of the numbers of young people around the world dealing with the death of a loved one without the means or support to process their often very difficult feelings. I also saw how bereaved young people had their digital memories of their loved one kept in chaotic ways on their phone amongst pictures they wouldn't want to share with their therapist or anyone over the age of 21! This made it difficult and awkward for them to honour, remember or talk about their loved one to other people. 

I'm Ben and I'm the chief techie here at Bounce Works. I'm focussed on how technology might be used to construct a "helpful" legacy. A legacy which could allow a bereaved young person to improve their understanding of who their parent was; to answer inevitable questions about their parent's personality long after their death. I'm also a Dad and I know that if something were to happen to me the "digital" is merely a side show, the only legacy that really matters is the one we all want to leave our children, a deep sense of love and self-worth that will stay with them and guide them for a lifetime.

Whether or not you’re in a position to make a financial pledge at the moment, we’d still really value your help in sharing the message about the Apart of Me mission and this crowdfunding campaign.

You can do this by sharing this page via social media, or mentioning Apart of Me to anyone you know you think might be interested.

We have had some really good press so far, as well as some amazing testimonials from young people, parents, and professionals who have tested Apart of Me.

FAQ