Difficult encounters inspired this Aurora woman to create an app that helps people ask questions about their life experiences

Decades after a childhood classmate licked her skin to see if it was chocolate, an Aurora-based consultant launched an app this fall so people with questions about those who don’t look like them can find answers.

“In first grade, a little boy licked my arm to see if I tasted like chocolate,” said Sonia Stovall, an Aurora-based consultant who used experiences like that to fuel her new app , “No Offense.” She launched it in September and has three dozen subscribers so far.

The app — which offers free content as well as subscription tiers for around $30 per month — receives new content regularly as Stovall meets people whose lived experiences could answer the app’s users’ questions.

To give an example of how the app works, Stovall, a talkative and outgoing Black woman, explained how she will use the lived experience of a person who uses a wheelchair to provide information to users of the app, from way to keep the user from having to ask what could be interpreted as an offensive question, while protecting the subject of the question from having to be embarrassed with a potentially triggering conversation.

“Jason is a quadriplegic who became this way after a cycling accident, but he still does marathons on his bike, just in his (motorized) chair,” Stovall, 51, said of an interviewee whose The story will be available on the app.

Sonia Stovall

She said the goal of this segment would be to help non-chair users understand Jason’s daily experiences and motivate them not to use disabled parking spaces.

“Seeing what it takes for him to get ready for the day, get through a day, the way his car was set up, helps you understand. . . . “Okay, that 10 minutes for me is quick, but it ruins his 45-minute day if he can’t find a spot,” she said.

According to Stovall, capturing the stories of the people who live them — like Jason — is what will work best.

“I think to overcome the manufactured divisions that are created in our society, bridging the gaps through stories is the best way to do that,” she said.

These stories will be published in the “Lived Experiences” section of the app, available to paid subscribers. To fill it with content, she contacts people she meets and interviews them, as she did recently in the Centennial home of Jenny Lerner, 62, an Ashkenazi Jew from Colombia.

In Lerner’s kitchen, Stovall sets up his recording equipment and ring light, using Lerner’s utensil pitcher to stabilize it. Stovall chose Lerner to show the range of people who identify as Jewish.

“So we were talking about how your family ended up in Colombia…” she began. Lerner, who has locks of curly hair and a melodic Spanish accent, responded readily, explaining, “So they went from Poland to Israel, from Israel to Peru…” and then to Colombia.

Stovall continued the conversation with gentle questions: “It sounds like a large part of your family was unable to leave Poland before the invasion and died in concentration camps?

Lerner responded: “Many of my family members who moved to Colombia later moved to Israel. . . The second generation decided to return. This is why most of my family now lives in Israel. They moved to Israel, but my parents did not. My parents continue to live in Colombia all the time. But cousins, uncles and brothers, a lot of them moved to Israel. . .”

Of his two daughters, Lerner said: “I mean, they feel Jewish, but at the same time, South American – they also feel Colombian, totally Colombian. »

To this, Stovall responded, “So they’re a combination of both because that’s where you end up, right? You are not one thing or another. You become a mixture of things.

Ifeoluwapo Oludare

Once Stovall edits the interview, she said, she will add it to the app. Although she had acquired basic knowledge of app development, to handle technical aspects outside her scope of expertise, she sought help on an online freelance marketplace. Ifeoluwapo Oludare, 24, a self-taught no-code platform developer, got the job.

“I was responsible for making sure everything was in sync,” Oludare said during a virtual interview from his coworking space in Nigeria. “And we also make sure that we also publish and distribute it on the Apple Store and the Google Store. We worked for a few weeks and I connected. . more than a hundred hours, at a rate of approximately 40 hours per week,” he said.

Stovall said the idea for the app came to her several years after elementary school years in Nebraska, where she grew up.

“‘No Offense’ came to me after I went on a date with (a white man), and this person was writing an article about black women and their hair,” she said. “However, he had not interviewed any black women for the article. And he himself was not a black man. He was not married to a black woman. So I asked him a few questions about how he felt qualified to take all the experiences he had with black women and translate them into this article. One of the things he said was that sometimes it’s better for these things – that is, facts or concepts about people from different cultures – to come from someone who is of white or close to white or something like that. And honestly, it made me so angry because I was like, “Why are you translating for us in white? »

She had an epiphany about how she could make a difference: “In about 24 hours, I woke up at two in the morning and thought, ‘There must be a place where people can learn from themselves -themselves.’ said she was looking for a similar app but couldn’t find one.

The title of the app refers to the way some people phrase questions (i.e. “No offense, but why do you wrap your head every day?”) to which the app can answer. Its logo is an Adinkra symbol, which is a visual symbol that represents concepts and proverbs; they come from Ghana and Ivory Coast. The one she chose was intentional.

“It is a knot without beginning or end that symbolizes reconciliation, peace and forgiveness,” Stovall said in an email.

Sonia Stovall

When asked how she decides what happens behind the paywall, she said, “Sometimes it depends on the time, how much work it takes. And then I have to edit it and put it in place. . . there are the legal aspects and all these things that I take care of. And if I had to pay someone to do these things, it would be very expensive. But because I have some of that experience myself and I can do it and. . . I have access and they are willing to share that access, I think it’s worth a few coins.

Stovall’s access to a wide range of people comes from intentionally building community with people she meets every day in the United States. It’s an experience that its app developer, Oludare in Nigeria, says doesn’t sit well with her.

“Well, on this side of the world I wouldn’t say we have that kind of thing here because actually it’s just one race and we don’t really have that kind of prejudice . So I don’t think we’re going to need something like that,” he said.

But Stovall discovers a need and related stories everywhere she goes, and plans to continue collecting content to fill categories on her app like “Ask Me Anything,” where people pitch Stovall with a question or request. situation they don’t know how to handle, and Stovall finds an answer.

“As I do more workshops and things like that, I meet more people,” she said. “So I recently met someone; she is an Indonesian immigrant and her daughter is deaf, and they recently made the decision to get her cochlear implants. And they experience a lot of negative reactions from their deaf community, who feel like they are turning their back on their community.

This story will soon be part of the app – for the same reason the other stories are there: “It will just help people start talking and asking these questions or asking them on the app, but also instead of find someone to ask them, Then you can just go to “Lived Experiences” and see what that looks like.