Daily Haloha, an AgeTech Collaborative™ startup participant, enriches individuals and builds community through the shared experience of collective ritual. Using a mobile app that connects people around the world in a non-judgmental space, participants answer a daily question designed to promote self-reflection and become part of a global collective experience.
Amy Giddon, Daily Haloha’s co-founder, CEO and chief connection officer, shared her vision for creating a world where everyone feels at home.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Daily Haloha is a mobile app, but that’s just the delivery mechanism for a daily ritual of collective self-reflection. Every day, we present one question to our participants that's meant to bring us closer to how we feel inside and awaken our awareness of how others might be feeling. The question is in a fill-in-the-blank format. It feels friendly and accessible, but sometimes it asks you to dig deep.
There are three steps to the process. First, you reflect on and answer the question, and you can assign it a mood that maps to a beautiful color. Second, you submit your response and it gets delivered randomly and anonymously to one other person; in turn, you get one response from someone else so you can see how they're feeling about that same question. We have stickers that come with little reactions and phrases that you can send in response to let that other person know that another real human somewhere on the planet has heard them and acknowledges them. Finally, you can go to our Haloha wall, where you can see responses rolling in all day long from all corners of the world.
Those three steps are intentionally designed to mirror how empathy develops: It starts with self-awareness and compassion. Then it moves into reciprocity and mutuality by hearing and being heard by another person in a non-judgmental environment. The third step is about taking perspective about how you feel in relation to others: “Oh, I’m not the only one who is experiencing this.”
What are some examples of questions that Daily Haloha poses?
Some recent questions have been: “My happy and confident future self would tell me _____.” “If I were feeling brave, I would _____.” “Something that brings beauty to my life is _____.”
Our questions are designed with positive psychology in mind. They’re meant to invite you to reflect, but not dwell in regret, shame or negative mental gyrations. They’re meant to focus on what’s positive in your world.
What inspired you to bring Daily Haloha into the world?
In the fall of 2016, after the presidential election, a participatory artist named Matthew Chavez created a Post-it wall in Union Square subway station in New York City. I was commuting through there every day, and I watched this wall of colorful Post-it notes blossom from a small patch to 50,000 individual notes of hope and love and unity in the wake of a polarizing election that left us all feeling separated.
That Post-it wall invited anonymous strangers to pause and reflect and contribute to this mosaic of humanity filled with positive intentions, and it felt like an antidote to the negative feelings we were all feeling. In its early days, social media held the promise of connection, but it has veered off into all sorts of invitations for tribalism, outrage and grandstanding. I thought there was room for creating a digital product that feels more like those sticky notes and less like social media.
That Post-it wall was really your model.
I took cues from it, including making Daily Haloha anonymous. It’s also a non-judgmental space and free of status: There’s no room for argument or debate, and there are no influencers or tallies of followers — everybody matters the same. This helps create a space where people feel the freedom to contribute authentically along with other brave, honest humans in the app.
Are there benefits of Daily Haloha specific to people who are 50-plus?
I’m very interested in providing that moment of connection for those who have been left behind by social media, which has become stratified by age: Instagram for female millennials, Facebook for the boomer, TikTok for Gen Z. Social media can be an uncomfortable space for older adults.
I’m also a huge believer in the magic that can happen in intergenerational spaces; it’s important for people across age groups to hear from each other and receive the wisdom of people unlike themselves. A teen might write, “Passing my driver’s license is important to me this week,” and an adult might write, “Seeing my grandkids is important to me this week.” Seeing what’s on the hearts of others is a reminder for everyone of the different stages of life.
Is the app only for individual users?
We extended our platform in 2021 so that specific communities can have access to the daily ritual privately with their members. We build private, invite-only channels within the app for any kind of community — it could be a school, a workplace, a retirement community, or a professional association. We create a series of custom questions based on their goals to promote the community’s well-being, and the host of the channel gets all the responses, anonymized. It’s about fostering a sense of belonging to the community. In the AgeTech space, Daily Haloha would be a really great tool for a residential setting or groups with other constituencies.
What’s next for Daily Haloha?
I am actively looking for a strategic partner to work with us to bring Daily Haloha to the next level, both in terms of growing our public app and also creating more opportunities for communities to use our platform. The time for growth is now: We’ve built the product; the tech is ready to go; we’ve had successful pilots. Now we have this incredible opportunity to scale our impact and commercialize the product, so I want to work with a strategic partner who can help us fulfill the promise of all that we’ve tested and proven.
Visit Daily Haloha’s website to learn more.
#SpotlightOn