I was one of the co-founders of ItsOkay Bangladesh and worked as a Creative Lead for the project from November 2016 to October 2019.
We built a website to build bridges between the urban youth in Bangladesh who were struggling with mental health issues and the resources they need to heal by allowing them to share stories, create communities without revealing identities, and connect with the experts.
The idea of this website was developed in Digital khichuri Challenge, a competition, co-sponsored by Facebook and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), with support from Google and organized by Affinis Labs. The event came up as a platform to help country’s youngsters to showcase their creativity and innovation through creative storytelling with ability to bring the rich traditions of peaceful coexistence under the spotlight. Our project had won 5000 USD from UNDP as seed funding and an office space from ICT Division.
ItsOkay tried to bring a change in Bangladeshi society’s ignorance about mental health. We reached 10000+ followers through our Facebook page with 2000+ monthly hits on the website. We ran multiple awareness campaigns and in one of those in July 2017, we achieved 392K post reaches and 16.6k engagements. more than 1k students called us for mental health support after board exam result. We continued our work by increasing knowledge base for mental health issues in Bangla, supporting the help seekers using digital platforms, raising awareness through visual storytelling and going offline with multiple events. ItsOkay provided me with a life long learning: it is empathy that makes human beings special and I always try to inspire people from my generation to do amazing things as a DKC alumnus.
Our noble works got featured in national dailies like the Daily Star, the New Age and official Facebook page of UNDP.
