Yorkville University's Monica Verbosky recently won the Canadian Counselling & Psychotherapy Association's 2021 Technology and Innovation Award for a self-care app she's currently developing.
The annual award, which is given out by the CCPA's Technology and Innovative Solutions Chapter (TISC), recognizes students who "use technology or technological approaches to promote self-care and balanced productivity, or to contribute to the improved health, well-being and safety of their clients."
"I was blown away when I heard. It was hard for me not to cry because my heart is just so in this project," the Master of Arts in Counselling Psychology said of winning the award for her app, MySolTrek.
"This app doesn't feel like anything else I've ever, ever done before. It's an awesome responsibility, but also a huge, huge adventure and I'm just so thankful."
TISC Past-President Linda Rombough presented the award - along with the one-year paid student CCPA and TISC membership that comes with it - to Verbosky during the CCPA's virtual award ceremony in May 2021.
"As a current Master of Arts in Counselling Psychology student, Monica shared how she developed an app geared 100 per cent towards self-care. It has the capability of being used for counselling, mentorship, or just as an individual end-user," Rombough said during the award's presentation.
"On behalf of the TISC board, we would like to congratulate Monica on her great work."
Verbosky, whose background is in tech sales, said she first came up with an analog' version of the MySolTrek app last summer, as she prepared for a long winter of COVID isolation at her home in the Kawartha Lakes.
What started as a personal resiliency journal to turn to during lockdown, soon became a tool for spiritual, social, physical, mental and emotional self-care Verbosky was keen to share amongst her lakeside neighbours.
"After pulling together a menu of ideas for myself to draw from on a dark January morning, I thought, You know what? I'm getting a lot out of this. I should do this for my girlfriends on the bay,'" she said,
"So, I designed something for them to do themselves, in journal form, then I sent them a text telling them I was going to come around on my kayak and drop something off for them."
The response to her efforts was so great, Verbosky said, that by Christmas, she'd sent out 50 more such journals to family and friends from here to London, England. By early 2021, at her loved ones' suggestions, she'd begun focusing her efforts on transforming her self-care system into app form.
The end result was MySolTrek, which Verbosky named in honour of her late parents' memory - sol' meaning sun in her mother's native Swedish, and trek' meaning journey in her father's Slovak.
