Engineering Chance Out Of The Equation: Athena Fights Assault Programmatically

Engineering Chance Out Of The Equation: Athena Fights Assault Programmatically

Yasmine Mustafa recognizes that chance might have saved her life. But that doesn’t preclude her from fighting against it.
 
Her earliest memory is huddling together with her friends, family, and neighbors as they braced for the next bomb to rattle their bomb shelter. Moments later, two men would come calling for her baby brother. These U.S. Embassy employees escorted her whole family out of Kuwait just as the Persian Gulf War began. They relocated to Philadelphia — where, months earlier, Yasmine’s mother gave birth to her brother while accompanying her father on a business trip. The fact Yasmine’s brother would be born a U.S. Citizen on a business trip and rescued from a war zone is nothing but pure chance.
 
Chance can make or break you, or leave you somewhere in the murky middle. Yasmine is a self-made entrepreneur fighting against the darker side of chance. She and her team built a safety alert tool called Athena to reduce women’s chance of being assaulted.
 
Athena is a wearable device that, at the press of a button, allows users to send out a call, text, and GPS information to a network of their emergency contacts using Twilio.
 
 

The Inspiration For Athena

Being born female should not place you at higher risk of being harmed. Yet, when Yasmine solo-trekked through South America on sabbatical for 6 months, she heard countless stories from women who had been assaulted.
 
When she returned home to Philadelphia, a woman was brutally attacked one block from her home. Shortly thereafter, she called serial entrepreneur and friend, Anthony Gold, and the two founded ROAR. A few months later, they started making plans for an IndieGoGo campaign to fund Athena.

By the second day of Athena’s IndieGogo campaign, ROAR raised $40,000 of their $40,000 goal. The 10th day, they raised $100,000. By the end of the campaign they raised over $300,000.
 
Today, ROAR has Athena pre-orders from every state in the U.S and over 50 countries.

ROAR’s Mission

Anthony credits Athena’s initial success to both need, thoughtful design, and core social mission. Devices like tasers or pepper spray are predicated on a close-quarters fight with a would-be attacker. Athena uses the power of communication to alert a network and stop an attack before it starts.
 
ROAR is also attempting to fight the root causes of violence against women. As a certified B-Corp, they donate a portion of their proceeds to educational programs that are proven to increase empathy and reduce violence. A substantial percentage of their proceeds go to raising awareness about the warning signs of abuse and putting an end to violence in relationships.
 
Yasmine, Anthony, and the rest of the ROAR team wake up every day asking themselves what more they can be doing to help reduce assaults and further empower women. And nothing would bring them more joy than for there to no longer be a need for products like Athena and companies like ROAR. Until then, they plan to do everything in their power to make a difference.
 
ROAR has their work cut out for them, but the tide seems to be shifting their favor. Yasmine knows that all she needs to improve thousands of women’s lives is a flicker of chance.