Pear Therapeutics, another Boston outfit, makes “digital therapeutics” — essentially apps that use cognitive behavioral therapy techniques to help recovering addicts stick with their treatment programs. Its anti-opioid program, Reset-O, was cleared by the Food and Drug Administration late last year and can now be prescribed by doctors in conjunction with other treatments.
To Lemontree, Goodr and Propel, for helping feed the hungry.
Lemontree, a nonprofit food-delivery app based in New York, was started by Alex Godin, an entrepreneur who sold a workplace collaboration start-up to Meetup several years ago. The company sells Blue Apron-style meal kits to low-income families for $3 apiece. Meal kits are packed by volunteers, and they can be bought with food stamps.
Goodr, described by its founder, Jasmine Crowe, as a “food delivery app in reverse,” is a platform based in Atlanta that helps save some of the 72 billion pounds of food wasted in the United States every year and give it to people in need. Restaurants sign up on the site to have their excess food picked up and donated to local nonprofits and homeless shelters. Goodr operates in six cities, including Chicago, Miami and Philadelphia, and says it has diverted 2.1 million pounds of food and provided 1.8 million meals since 2017.
Propel, a Brooklyn start-up, is the creator of Fresh EBT, a popular app that helps low-income users manage their food stamps and other benefits. After doing battle with a larger government contractor last year, Propel recovered this year and says more than two million households use it every month.
To Pinterest, for taking a stand against social media toxicity.
When you think of Pinterest, you probably picture mood boards, D.I.Y. hacks and mommy-bloggers. But the social network spent much of 2019 doing the kinds of tough, principled work that its bigger rivals often neglected.
In August, the company announced that users searching for vaccine-related information would be shown results from authoritative sources like the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, rather than being led down rabbit holes filled with misinformation. The company also introduced a “compassionate search” experience, which offers mental health advice and exercises to users whose behavior indicates they might be feeling anxious or depressed, such as people who search for things like “sad quotes” or who look up terms relating to self-harm. And in December, Pinterest joined other wedding websites in announcing that it would limit the promotion of wedding venues that were once slave plantations.
Pinterest hasn’t always operated flawlessly. But while its competitors were giving grandiose speeches and supplicating at the White House, the company’s content-moderation choices stood out as an example of a social network with a moral compass.